Tim Bray’s response to Clay Shirky’s SemWeb piece

For some reason, I had expected Tim Bray to be more strongly in the pro-RDF/semantic web camp. It turns out that he sees things similarly to the way I do: Metadata, Semantics and All That. He talks about wanting a critical mass of “metadata”, but his example of company information seems to me to be actual “data”. He talks about XBRL for reporting business information, which I think makes my point from Saturday. Using well-defined and accepted XML formats provides a great deal of value for data interchange, because you have all of the context you need.