Re: Question on API paper

Thank you for your explanations, Raphael. I think I now understand your 
position better and I appologize for my (terminological) confusion.

Raphaël Troncy さんは書きました:
> Hi Felix,
>
>> I know this sounds probably boring, but I still have
>> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-media-annotation/2008Sep/0045.html 
>> and issue 6113 in mind, where Dave pointed out that having a small 
>> set of tags as a result of our work would be useful.
>
> Hum, this is not boring but a proper way to record and address the 
> issues :-) So, I think our problem here is a terminological one.
>
> The term 'ontology' can be perceived as scary, more precisely as 
> something by nature complex and that we -- ''hackers and developers'' 
> -- do no want to use. Well, this is simply a fallacy. Is Dublin Core 
> complex? No, it is not ... It is even often criticized as being too 
> simplistic, but the pragmatics will say this is the good least common 
> denominator of requirements and many formats.
>
> This group can deliver a Dublin Core for video, a minimal set of 
> properties for describing several aspects of videos on the web that I 
> would even classify into 5 categories: descriptive, technical and 
> structural, management, administrative and rights (order has no 
> importance). Some, will just point to placeholder where the group 
> could recommend to use standard a or b (e.g. the rights issue).

Your paragraph above sounds like a very good way to sell our work to the 
larger hacker and developers community.

>
> I personally do not like to use the term 'tag' in this context, for 
> all what it presupposes (anarchy).
>
>> In terms of the API, for me that would translate to an API that may 
>> be related to the ontology, but "must" (as a very strong requirement) 
>> be useable without  any  relation to the ontology. If we want to have 
>> widespread adoption in the browser community, the ordinary web 
>> developer needs to be able to execute the operations we are talking 
>> about (query, update, ...) without any knowledge  about the ontology.
>
> I don't see how the API could be _not_ related to the ontology. I 
> thought the purpose of the API is to read/write metadata that conforms 
> to the ontology.

The question IMO is what "conforms" means. In
http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord/download/publications/cooking03.pdf
sec.  2.5. describes aspects of functionality for handling *the 
ontology*:  serializing, modelling, parsing, manipulation, inference. I 
think in our work we need funtionality for handling *instances*, and I 
am not sure yet how the paper provides answers for that.  But I'm sure 
we can discuss this in detail and getting clarification sooner via f2f 
communication next week.

>
> Hiding the ontology to the user and even the programmer is a different 
> matter, that does not mean the ontology does not exist. Educating 
> people for showing them that 'ontology' does not equal 'complexity' is 
> also something that the group might do, providing examples and 
> guidelines.

That is indeed a good goal.

Felix

Received on Thursday, 16 October 2008 23:32:39 UTC