Global concept identification and reference: Published Subjects and decentrally provided identification points for notions

Dear list,

Gabriel Hopmans of Morpheus (g.hopmans@mssm.nl) today made me aware of
ongoing discussion on this list about subject identification in relation
to thesauri which is close to XTM published subjects but - except the
recent PSI nocturne invitation by Bernard Vatant -

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2004Nov/0016.html

does not explicitly mention them.

Maybe my understanding is limited here, since I hitherto have not been a
regular follower of this list, but I think it is crucial that SW best
practice include XTM for concept identification, interrelation and
mapping.

"Official URI" would be in XTM terminology a PSI issued from the
thesaurus owner, an "inofficial" a PSI issued by anyone.

I see a very centralistic world view when A J Miles states that one
might want to discourage decentrally issued SIPs. In my view, this
capability, combined with identity assertions decentrally issued by even
more players, will be the key to emerging ontologies and distributed
knowledge management in an empistemologically open world.

 

Knowledge workers in discourse communities will provide PSIs in a P2P
fashion, and the mapping problem is tackled by issuing identity
assertions as part of the discourse in a p2p fashion. This is related to
a postmodern theory of knowledge organization.

 

I also want to point you to my discussion of the basic question

"How can we, with principled Knowledge Organization, prepare for better
semantic interoperability between independently authored Topic Maps and
between independently operated PSI registries?" 

Chapter 15: Topic Maps in Knowledge Organization, p. 386, in: Park &
Hunting: XML Topic Maps. Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web.
Addison-Wesley 2002/2003.

 

(here is an earlier draft:

http://kpeer.wim.uni-koeln.de/~sigel/veroeff/XTM-Book/ko-tm-3-02-01.pdf
<http://kpeer.wim.uni-koeln.de/~sigel/veroeff/XTM-Book/ko-tm-3-02-01.pdf
> )

 

And p. 416: "Arbitrary proliferation of the introduction of new terms
should be avoided with an appropriate [PSI] registry architecture."

(And more on recurring challenges and bottom-up construction of KOSs by
discourse communities on p. 430f.)

 

And p. 433: "I assume that an architecture for Topic Maps published
subject registries will be necessariliy decentralized since the common
trend in Knowlege Organization goes from centrally controlled Knowledge
Organization systems with normative authority to decentrally provided
metadata."

 

A J Miles:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2004Nov/0009.html

<quote>

In the mean time, we would like to be able to publish RDF descriptions
of
existing thesauri, for which there are no 'official' concept URIs.  

One practise has been, in this case, to make up unofficial URIs.
However,
this practise can obviously lead to the proliferation of multiple URIs
for
the same concept.  Although the mechanisms obviously exist to cope with
this, from a pragmatic point of view it might make sense to discourage
this
practise, unless absolutely necessary, where alternatives exist and it
can
be avoided.

</quote>

 

McCathieNevile this morning seems a bit closer to XTM PSIs:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-esw-thes/2004Nov/0023.html

 

<quote>

For instance, if you describe a concept
from a thesaurus, using the URI http://example.com/Foo and I describe
something and give it the URI http://example.com/Bar I can then say

  <http://example.com/Bar> owl:sameAs <http://example.com/Foo> - i.e.
the
descriptions are about the same thing, and you can collapse the two
decriptions into one.

If we agree on this, well and good, and we might provide mutual
crossreferences to each other's URIs, so people can do some basic trust
checking ("fred says he knows john, john says he knows fred" is more
reliable
than "fred says he knows john" - especially on the web).

</quote>

 

The posting by Leonard Will

From: Leonard Will [mailto:L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk
<mailto:L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk> ]

Sent: 05 November 2004 12:20

forwarded to this list some minutes ago is also very close to PSIs.

 

 

In addition I want to point you to the paper by Steve Pepper and Sylvia
Schwab on Curing the Web's identity crisis:

http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/identitycrisis.html

how Subject Indicators can help answer the question "What do URIs
identify?". [March 2003] 

 

It also appeared in the September issue of interChange, the newsletter
of the International SGML/XML Users' Group. (from the Report from
Extreme Markup 2003)

 

Regards

alex

-----
Alexander Sigel, M.A., Researcher in Semantic Knowledge Networking
sigel@wim.uni-koeln.de, +49 221 470-5322, http://kpeer.wim.uni-koeln.de/
U Cologne, Dept. of Information Systems & Information Management
office: Pohligstr. 1, Room 406, 50969 Cologne, GERMANY