- From: Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
- Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:45:07 +0100
- To: Antoine Isaac <Antoine.Isaac@KB.nl>
- Cc: Simon Spero <sesuncedu@gmail.com>, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>, Mikael Nilsson <mikael@nilsson.name>, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter@gmail.com>, dbpedia-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net, SKOS <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
Antoine Isaac a écrit : > > > I don't remember the precise reference, but I read once that an > antelope becomes a document as soon as it is in a zoo, which makes > quite some sense to me. > Briet, S. (1951). /Qu'est que la documentation?/. Paris: Editions Documentaires Industrielles et Techniques. See http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/thing.html for references, including Simon's reference to Otlet Note that this way older than most of us are, even including myself :-) > > > Actually in your wikipedia case there might be a problem anyway. I > would not say that it is the TimBL resource which is about the history > of the net, but its description on wikipedia: > I would not say "TimBL's description on Wikipedia", but "TimBL as defined in his Wikipedia description" > > what if this description had been purely biological (size, hair color, > preferred beer)? In this case the categorization of the resource you > describe under "history of the internet" would be problematic, > wouldn't it? > If that case, the problem would not be in DBpedia interpretation, but in Wikipedia categorisation, which should change then to, well, say "Dating profile"?. The real problem here is to know if TimBL has only one identity, defined by a single URI (or the set of all its owl:sameAs equivalents), to which a consistent set of assertions can be attached. Seen at the level of current DBpedia, the answer is assumed to be "yes". But the more precisely you will look at it, the more you will need to split this so-called individual in a cluster of avatars (the child, the student, the CERN engineer, the tax-payer, the patient, the Web inventor, etc ...), which will at some point need different URIs and different descriptions if you want to keep some consistency. That will happen first in Wikipedia, when an article will be split in several ones, because the subject description has gained in complexity and accuracy. I guess DBpedia will synchronise, but what will happen to deprecated URIs? Astronomers know that, a single star to the naked eye is a multiple system in instruments, the number of components growing with the power of the instrument. In brief, looking closely at any thing leads most of the time to the loss of its identity/individuality. This fractal and evolving nature of reality we'll need to take into account in our systems, when semantics go beyond the naive notion of the world as a set of well-identified, pre-existing things. We've just started scratching the surface of all this I'm afraid. Bernard -- *Bernard Vatant *Knowledge Engineering ---------------------------------------------------- *Mondeca** *3, cité Nollez 75018 Paris France Web: www.mondeca.com <http://www.mondeca.com> ---------------------------------------------------- Tel: +33 (0) 871 488 459 Mail: bernard.vatant@mondeca.com <mailto:bernard.vatant@mondeca.com> Blog: Leçons de Choses <http://mondeca.wordpress.com/>
Received on Thursday, 24 January 2008 18:45:19 UTC