Re: Schema.org in RDF ...

-Alan

On Jun 11, 2011, at 5:57 PM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 2011-06-11 at 17:55 +0100, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> [ . . . ]
>>> http://schema.org/Person is not the same as foaf:Person; one is a 
>>> class of documents, the other the class of people.
>> 
>> I don't think that's correct at all. http://schema.org/Person is the 
>> class of people and is equivalent to foaf:Person. 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.
> 
> Furthermore, the kind of ambiguity that this creates is *inescapable* in
> general, and we simply need to learn to deal with it.  As long as an
> application does not attempt to assert that foaf:Person is
> owl:disjointWith the class of documents, there is no problem.  It is
> only a problem for those applications the *need* to distinguish between
> foaf:Persons and document.  Furthermore, there is a *cost* in making
> finer distinctions than needed.  For example, an ontology that models
> the world as flat costs less to process and maintain than one that
> models the world as round, even though it is obviously "wrong" in some
> sense.  But modeling the world as flat is *better* for an application
> that is merely computing driving directions, because it is simpler, even
> though it would be totally inadequate for an aircraft application.
> 
> Resource ambiguity is not something that should be viewed as an
> absolute.  Rather, it is *relative* to a particular application: a URI
> that is completely unambiguous to one application may be ambiguous to
> another application that requires finer distinctions.

David, as you know, it is trivial to distinguish in representation the difference between an information object and a person. I don't understand why you keep repeating this misinformation. 

-Alan

> 
> For more explanation of this, see myth #3 in "Resource Identity and
> Semantic Extensions: Making Sense of Ambiguity":
> http://dbooth.org/2010/ambiguity/paper.html#myth3
> 
> And see Pat Hayes's favorite example of the definition of Mount Everest:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2011Mar/0242.html
> 
> While it is nicer to the community to avoid ambiguity that is *likely*
> to cause problems to lots of applications, ultimately it is up to the
> URI owner to decide what kinds of applications they want their URIs to
> support.  OTOH, if your application will be negatively affected, there
> is nothing wrong with lobbying the URI owner to change their ways to
> better support *your* application.  At the same time, you should
> recognize that *your* application is not *every* application.
> 
> 
> -- 
> David Booth, Ph.D.
> http://dbooth.org/
> 
> Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
> reflect those of his employer.
> 
>

Received on Saturday, 11 June 2011 23:56:45 UTC