{Disarmed} Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

On 13/06/11 12:41, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> On 13 Jun 2011, at 09:59, Christopher Gutteridge wrote:
>> The real problem seems to me that making resolvable, HTTP URIs for real world things was a clever but dirty hack and does not make any semantic sense.
> Being useful trumps making semantic sense. The web succeeded *because* it conflates name and address. The web of data will succeed *because* it conflates a thing and a web page about the thing.
>
> <http://richard.cyganiak.de/>
>      a foaf:Document;
>      dc:title "Richard Cyganiak's homepage";
>      a foaf:Person;
>      foaf:name "Richard Cyganiak";
>      owl:sameAs<http://twitter.com/cygri>;
>      .
>
> There.
>
> If your knowledge representation formalism isn't smart enough to make sense of that, then it may just not be quite ready for the web, and you may have some work to do.
>
> Best,
> Richard
*grin*. I have the urge to get a "/Ceci Est Une Pipe/" T-Shirt.

If the goal is to make it easy to add semantics to HTML documents, then 
cool. I see the point in that, but we should just get the semantics right.

on my homepage <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg/>, I want to say that 
I'm a member of TotL.

<a href="http://totl.net/" rev="foaf:member">ToTL</a>

Option one is to read that as

<http://totl.net/>  foaf:member<http://<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg/>  .

which is not true and prevents us making any statements about the 
documents directly (ie. license, creator, last modified)
or we could treat that as

<http://totl.net/>  foaf:primaryTopic _:bnode1 .
<http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg/>  foaf:primaryTopic _:bnode2 .
_:bnode2 foaf:member _:bnode1 .


However, maybe RDF predicates are not really suitable for embedding in 
HTML like this. What might work better is if you have new predicates 
which explicitly means <the primary topic of this document has a member 
who is the primary topic of...>

That way the semantics are actually correct you can process it all fine 
and it still maps into RDF.

This is more or less what schema.org seems to be doing, if I've 
understood correctly...



-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

/ Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
/ Web Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
/ Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/