Re: URI Patterns (was RE: MARC Codes for Forms of Musical Composition)

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 5:04 PM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote:
> Kendall,
>
> I'll try to limit myself to one overstatement per message in the future. :-)

In return for this admirable restraint, I won't point them out any more. ;>

> I sympathize with the confusion and no-doubt frustration I've caused with my arguments. Some (all?) of them were poorly constructed. In case you missed it, I'm willing to believe that a chocolate cake and a book could be owl:sameAs while being skeptical about a bibo:Book and a frbr:Manifestation. I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that some of us (presumably) care about splitting these hairs and some don't.
>

As I said, it's primarily a tool for aligning or merging data source
records that contain (partial) information about the same thing. In
practice, I've found that there are rarely any confusions about what
"the same thing" means. But, even when there are, the test for whether
any particular usage of sameAs is a good one is pretty simple and
quite practical: if you find the resulting inferences helpful in some
way, then it's a good use. If you don't, then it's not.

> My skepticism about identity *is* metaphysical (no doubt influenced by OpenURL) and yet I believe that concepts and identity are unavoidable. Here's my overstatement for this message. The only reason I understand a word anyone says is because of OWL. To the extent people abuse owl:sameAs, I get confused.
>

I certainly agree that people misusing sameAs is problematic. I don't
agree w/ the position that some people advocate, namely, since sameAs
is misused in some cases, then it has no utility at all.

I note in passing that this isn't the first time that the OWL person
was pushing the hard pragmatism point. :>

Cheers,
Kendall

Received on Friday, 9 July 2010 21:13:57 UTC