Re: owl:sameAs - Harmful to provenance?

On 4/4/13 1:43 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
> Dropping Jim from cc in deference to him finishing his defense.
>
> On Wed, Apr 3, 2013 at 9:58 PM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org 
> <mailto:david@dbooth.org>> wrote:
>
>     On 04/02/2013 05:02 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
>         On Tuesday, April 2, 2013, David Booth wrote:
>             On 03/27/2013 10:56 PM, Pat Hayes wrote:
>                 On Mar 27, 2013, at 7:32 PM, Jim McCusker wrote:
>
>                     If only owl:sameAs were used correctly...
>
>                 Well, I agree that is a problem, but don't draw the
>         conclusion that
>                 there is something wrong with sameAs, just because
>         people keep using
>                 it wrong.
>
>             Agreed.  And furthermore, don't draw the conclusion that
>         someone has
>             used owl:sameAs wrong just because you get garbage when
>         you merge
>             two graphs that individually worked just fine.  Those two
>         graphs may
>             have been written assuming different sets of interpretations.
>
>         In that case I would certainly conclude that they have used it
>         wrong.
>         Have you not been reading what Pat and I have been writing?
>
>
>     I've read lots of what you and Pat have written.  And I've learned
>     a lot from it -- particularly in learning about ambiguity from
>     Pat.  And I'm in full agreement that owl:sameAs is *often* misused.
>
>     But I don't believe that getting garbage when merging two graphs
>     that individually worked fine *necessarily* indicates that
>     owl:sameAs was misused -- even when it appears on the surface to
>     be causing the
>     problem. 
>
>
> The word misuse is tricky here. If each individually acted without 
> knowledge of the other, what you describe can certainly arise. However 
> that doesn't change the fact that in the end someone is wrong.
What about the following with regards to the *tricky* situation:

In the end something is wrong, and it could be any combination of:

1. data publisher
2. data consumer
3. tools used by data consumer -- which may or may not handle reasoning 
and inference in a flexible manner e.g., leverage named graph 
partitioning and conditional invocation of reasoner.

David:

The reality above still doesn't invalidate the fundamental point about 
interpretation or RDF semantic though i.e., when a human or machine 
attempts to make sense of the claims in the RDF model constrained graph. 
An interpretation could be that that graph is structurally fine but 
logically incoherent.

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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