Annoying Advocacy
by Kendall Clark
One thing that really, really annoys me is clueless OWL haters. OWL isn’t perfect, of course, and it’s certainly not the best tool for many tasks. In fact, we spend a lot of our time talking to customers about those cases where OWL isn’t applicable, if only because we love to undersell and overdeliver. But there’s good criticism, and then there’s clueless drivel—all too often, I hear the latter instead of the former.
In my view, too many SemWeb advocates fall into this trap of clueless OWL hating, most often tinged with rather a bit of anti-academic, anti-intellectual know-nothingism. This really annoys me, not least because several of us in C&P, got our starts in academia; and in academia, and since then, we’ve been relentlessly focused on solving real world problems with our tools.
In other words, this anti-intellectual, OWL-is-impractical crap annoys me because it’s so trivially false. That is, what makes the OWL haters so tiresome is that, more often than not, they simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t put in the time or energy to actually learn OWL’s (and Description Logic’s) actual warts, problems, and faults.
The standard claim runs something like this: “I’m no expert, and I’ve only just started reading about DL and OWL, but I’m pretty sure that it’s useless and is really holding the SemWeb back with its academic-centric focus”, etc. I’ve read that kind of claim dozens and dozens of times on weblogs and in email over the past few years. Couldn’t they at least find some new crappy line?
Ultimately I suppose none of this bad advocacy really matters much, since whether or not any of this technology takes off or not is more a function of big, structural forces rather than what any particular people do or say. But, speaking only personally, it gets old to hear people bashing stuff that they haven’t even taken the care to properly understand.
Say what you want about academia and research communities, but they are places where the priority of understanding to criticism—that is, you don’t evaluate anything until you really understand it—is still practiced. That’s one of the scientific virtues that even self-appointed advocates and marketeers would do well to emulate.
