He lives below the senseless stars and writes his meanings in them
- Thomas Wolfe

In Shelley's starlings post, she talks about the URI debate, and how some think we can sidestep the word "resource", since we've gotten this far without precisely considering it. Usually, while reading debates like this, I begin to feel like a kid with his hands to his ears, yelling, "na na na na na" to block out the sound.

Thankfully I was a philosophy minor, which means I've developed a tolerance for this "what's in a name" nonsense. I once wrote a paper on Russell's Theory of Descriptions years ago, with him and Frege and Meinong all going at it like some Mad Hatter's Tea: "The present king of france has no meaning in isolation." "In the context of a sentence, it functions unlike a name, since names must denote and this one doesn't." "Ah, but it posits a nonexistent object." "No, no, it's referent is the null class." I haven't thought it through, but I suspect you could substitute URIs for "referent" in those papers, and it'd be the same damned debate.

Either way, the answer is the same. In comes Strawson, who says there's a difference between the use of a sentence and the sentence itself. See there's syntax, which we all get completely, then there's semantics, which sounds cool enough, then there's pragmatics, which provides the real mojo, at least for me. I'm sure my logical theory is rusty, but my creative sensibilities are in tune:

None of this does anyone any good unless it's aimed at helping real people do things they need and want to do.

Yeah, we're all smart. Yeah, clever things are fun. Yeah, there's some necessary thought work that needs doing. But Shelley hit it dead on when she wrote: "FOAF is becoming the bastard child that grew from the seeds that fell between the cracks of W3C debates." I suspect there's a similiar disdain for RSS, the other real-world right-now pragmatic use of RDF. Truth is, we should be pointing to these things proudly, not distancing ourselves because they don't conform to our academic aesthetics.

In the movie Me & Isaac Newton, there's two physicists: one theoretical, the other pragmatic. The first deals with quantum complexity, the other designs a simple inexpensive box that lets water pass below a fluorescent light. I'm sure that when the latter guy goes to conferences, some people think, "Big whoop. He made a box with a light bulb in it." But this box solves a real problem: it helps villages in developing countries kill bacteria in their water. This simple idea could save literally millions of lives.

In Sanibel, whenever we had lunch by the pool, I'd look at the lot of us, our 300 bright minds, and think, "Imagine the good we could do, if we wanted." Such a collection of talent, and where will it lead? For myself, I won't be satisfied till real people benefit. That's my "meaning" of the Semantic Web. To me, all the rest's just smoke, just talk, just semantics.