-----Original Message-----
From:   Francis Norton [SMTP:francis@r...]
Sent:   Tuesday, October 17, 2000 8:02 AM
Cc:     xml-dev@l...
Subject:        Re: Realistic proposals to the W3C?

All fashions tend to come and go in cycles, and maybe artificial
intelligence has just about reached its nadir (does anyone who does it
still use the term, even?)

After all, what would *you* do with a logical-predicate database the
size of a small planet?

Isn't that more or less what CYC www.cyc.com  is?  Douglas Lenat (its inventor) spoke at Extreme Markup, I believe; did he relate CYC to the "semantic web" or RDF? 

I admit to suffering the extreme cynicism about "AI" that comes from having been a zealot about its potential in my mis-spent youth and suffering continued disillusionment since ... and  it's hard to shake the feeling that the 'semantic web' is 1980's AI hype on life support.  Could anyone set me straight if this is terribly unfair?

 (Yes I *know* that Tim BL denies the connection between the semantic web and AI, but I'm talking about the community and its technologies, not the abstract goal of making software "intelligent").