Re: LDP Minutes of June 3 - straw-poll ?

On 4 Jun 2013, at 16:13, Roger Menday <Roger.Menday@uk.fujitsu.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> My characterisation: 
>>>> 
>>>> 1. Managing Documents (about Things) in Boxes 
>>>> 2. Use Boxes to help managing Things (which might be inside Documents)
[...]
>>> 
>>> That why I say that Boxes are just a means to an end (rather than the end themselves). Boxes just contain the membershipTriples.
>> 
>> Boxes are LDPCs if I understand. The membershipXX are really attempts to declare certain things.
>> 
>>> 
>>>> The use case people are trying to solve with the propertyXX relations I think needs to
>>>> be worked out and described carefully. The the idea would be to find some patterns 
>>>> that allow you to  satisfy the use case of adding  relations in connected LDPRs when creating an LDPR.
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> I believe that no.2 is where more applications are.    
>>>> 
>>>> Since you can do everyting with 1, you can't claim there are more applications in 2.
>>> 
>>> That's true. 
>>> So one can do everything with both models :) 
>> 
>> I was saying you can do everything with 1. What is up with 2 
>> I don't know. It is really not clear.
>> 
>>> Which one is the mainstream developer going to be happier with ? 
>> 
>> Something that works. I am sure 1 works. 2 is not clear at all.
>> 1 is Atom semanticised: devs can leverage a lot of knowledge to 
>> understand that. 2 seems like OO thinking applied to the web, which
>> seems like XMLRPC.
> 
> So, no.2 is interesting because I think it is the best basis for doing hyperRDF, and that seems pretty far away from the accusations you are making. Anyway, you can't say "don't understand no.2" and then toss around "it's just XMLRPC" !! I am trying to understand why you want to do semanticisedATOM btw ... :) 

To explain how I come to "XMLRPC" : you speaks of manipulating "things" (aka objects) 
remotely: that seems to  be an OO programming way of thinking of the matter. 
OO has a problem of  not being able to distinguish between contexts - who 
said what [1] - and it is the way of thinking developers have been the most 
liable to fall into, and which has led to some of the biggest failures in 
distributed systems.

The web in general and the semantic web in particular fall in the declarative
way of programming ( eg: prolog,  reasoning systems, etc.... ) . There you 
express what is the case, by making statements through what in linguistics
is known as speech acts, for which the equivalent on the web are our  HTTP
verbs: GET, PUT, POST, DELETE... The importance of declarative systems
is that they can be loosely coupled and they can scale. 

In these declarative system it is not object that you manipulate but documents. Documents
when interpreted describe restrictions on the set of ways the world can be. The
semantic web makes it easy to merge RDF documents, which when done creates a new
graph which creates restrictions that are the intersection of the possibilites 
expressed by each document. So manipulating documents, you are manipulating 
possibilites - not objects. In fact it is just the opposite of manipulating 
objects.

Now the danger is that you can spend a lot of money in vain building systems
that will crumble if you fail to make this distinction. The web is an global
communication system, not an object interchange system - or at least the only 
objects interchanged are representations of documents.


Henry


[1] https://blogs.oracle.com/bblfish/entry/are_oo_languages_autistic


Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Tuesday, 4 June 2013 15:39:19 UTC