Re: Schema.org in RDF ...

On Jun 11, 2011, at 12:20 PM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:

> ...
>>> It's just that the schema.org designers don't seem to care much about the distinction between information resources and angels and pinheads. This is the prevalent attitude outside of this mailing list and we should come to terms with this.
>> 
>> I think we should foster a greater level of respect for representation
>> choices here. Your dismissal of the distinction between information
>> resources and what they are about insults the efforts of many
>> researchers and practitioners and their efforts in domains where such
>> a distinction in quite important. Let's try not to alienate part of
>> this community in order to interoperate with another.
> 
> Look, Alan. I've wasted eight years arguing about that shit and defending httpRange-14, and I'm sick and tired of it. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Freebase and the New York Times are violating httpRange-14. I consider that battle lost. I recanted. I've come to embrace agnosticism and I am not planning to waste any more time discussing these issues.


Well, I am sympathetic to not defending HTTP-range-14 and nobody ever, ever again even mentioning "information resource", but I don't think we can just make this go away by ignoring it. What do we say when a URI is used both to retrieve, um sorry, identify, a Web page but is also used to refer to something which is quite definitely not a web page? What do we say when the range of a property is supposed to be, say, people, but its considered OK to insert a string to stand in place of the person? In the first case we can just say that identifying and reference are distinct, and that one expects the web page to provide information about the referent, which is a nice comfortable doctrine but has some holes in it. (Chiefly, how then do we actually refer to a web page?) But the second is more serious, seems to me, as it violates the basic semantic model underlying all of RDF through OWL and beyond. Maybe we need to re-think this model, but if so then we really ought to be doing that re-thinking in the RDF WG right now, surely? Just declaring an impatient agnosticism and refusing to discuss these issues does not get things actually fixed here.

Pat

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Received on Saturday, 11 June 2011 23:52:41 UTC