Re: Show me the money - (was Subjects as Literals)

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 10:38 AM, Henry Story <henry.story@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2 Jul 2010, at 09:39, Ian Davis wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 4:44 AM, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
>>> Jeremy, your argument is perfectly sound from your company's POV, but not
>>> from a broader perspective. Of course, any change will incur costs by those
>>> who have based their assumptions upon no change happening. Your company took
>>> a risk, apparently. IMO it was a bad risk, as you could have implemented a
>>> better inference engine if you had allowed literal subjects internally in
>>> the first place, but whatever. But that is not an argument for there to be
>>> no further change for the rest of the world and for all future time. Who
>>> knows what financial opportunities might become possible when this change is
>>> made, opportunities which have not even been contemplated until now?
>>>
>>
>> I think Jeremy speaks for most vendors that have made an investment in
>> the RDF stack. In my opinion the time for this kind of low level
>> change was back in 2000/2001 not after ten years of investment and
>> deployment. Right now the focus is rightly on adoption and fiddling
>> with the fundamentals will scare off the early majority for another 5
>> years. You are right that we took a risk on a technology and made our
>> investment accordingly, but it was a qualified risk because many of us
>> also took membership of the W3C to have influence over the technology
>> direction.
>>
>> I would prefer to see this kind of effort put into n3 as a general
>> logic expression system and superset of RDF that perhaps we can move
>> towards once we have achieved mainstream with the core data expression
>> in RDF. I'd like to see 5 or 6 alternative and interoperable n3
>> implementations in use to iron out the problems, just like we have
>> with RDF engines (I can name 10+ and know of no interop issues between
>> them)
>
> I like this solution.
>
> There are a lot of good reasons for keeping rdf/xml as is.
> For one many people use it. Secondly it does not have named graphs, which means that
> at least people using it, must stick to saying what they know/believe, instead of trying to
> say what they think other people know. This means there is a lot less ways for
> people to go wrong.
>
> But we could focus on N3 and standardise it as N4 perhaps. This would
> give us a powerful notation for writing out rules, doing clever belief based
> reasoning, add methematical functions, ... which will be needed by any linked
> data application: those apps need to have rules such as "believe what Jane says
> about knitting but not about medicine".
>
> As those advanced usages get to be tested we can then finally come back to rdf/xml
> and other formats if needed and enhance them. I think doing this will help the
> vendors start thinking about enhancing their rdf machinery making
> it a lot more flexible over time. For some reason these vendors seem to
> have unnecessarily limited the functioning of their engines.
>
> It is also a lot easier to teach something like N3.

+1

I would be very happy with that as well. A standardised N3 would be great.

Best,
y

>
> Henry
>
>
>> Ian
>>
>
>

Received on Friday, 2 July 2010 10:09:22 UTC