Re: Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and Linked Data

Hi Tim,

> I can't think of a term for "the information which you get about the 
> thing identified by it  when you look up a URI" which works for me.

> It has of course the term "Representation" which connects an 
> Information Resource and the (metadata, bits) pair which you get 
> back, which is different.

As we did not want to repeat the definition all over the tutorial, we 
ended up with a term called "data item".

Within section 2.1 of the tutorial, we define the term as: "The term 
data items refers to the description of a non-information resource 
that a client obtains by dereferencing a specific URI that identifies 
this non-information resource." 
(http://sites.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/suhl/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/#aliases)

Note that the definition is a bit more specific than your sentence 
above, as it is restricted to non-information resources and not things 
in general (assuming that your term "thing" refers to non-information 
resources as well as information resources).

We were also struggling to find a good word that matches the concept 
and have chosen "data item" in the end as it somehow relates to the 
overall term "Linked Data" and as we hope that people from the 
database community will understand the second informal definition of 
the term: "When you interpret the Web of Data as a set of interlinked 
databases, a data item would equal a record in a specific database."

Cheers

Chris



--
Chris Bizer
Freie Universität Berlin
Phone: +49 30 838 54057
Mail: chris@bizer.de
Web: www.bizer.de

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>
To: "Chris Bizer" <chris@bizer.de>
Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>; <semantic-web@w3.org>; "Linking Open Data" 
<linking-open-data@simile.mit.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 3:35 PM
Subject: Re: Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and 
Linked Data



(Going back to the original question, as it is much simpler than much
which follows!)

On 2007-07 -07, at 08:43, Chris Bizer wrote:

>
> Hi all,
>
> Richard Cyganiak, Tom Heath and me are currently writing a tutorial 
> on how to publish Linked Data [1] on the Web and ran into some 
> terminology questions concerning Web Architecture.
>
> Here is the problem statement together with an example: Within the 
> Linking Open Data community project [2] different data sources (URI 
> owners) publish information about Tim Berners-Lee using different 
> HTTP URIs:
>
> 1. DBpedia: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee
> 2. Hannover DBLP Server: http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/resource/authors/ 
> Tim_Berners-Lee
> 3. Berlin DBLP Server: http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/ 
> resource/person/100007
> 4. RDF Book Mashup: http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/ 
> persons/Tim+Berners-Lee
>
> The first 3 data sources follow the W3C TAG "Dereferencing HTTP 
> URIs" finding [3]  and redirect via HTTP 303 to documents 
> describing Tim Berners-Lee when the URIs are dereferenced over the 
> Web. Therefore, the URIs identify Tim Berners-Lee as a non- 
> information resource. This redirect also supports HTTP content 
> negotiation and leads to HTML as well as RDF descriptions of Tim.
>
> 5. Tim also publishes a FOAF profile in which he assigns the URI 
> http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i to himself.
>
> Question 1: According to the terminology of the Architecture of the 
> WWW document [4] are all these URIs aliases for the same non- 
> information resource (our current view) or are they referring to 
> different resources?

They are indeed all aliases, in that they identify the same thing.

> Does the TAG finding "On Linking Alternative Representations To 
> Enable Discovery And Publishing " [5] about generic and specific 
> resources apply here, meaning that the URIs 1,2,3,5 refer to 
> different specific non-information resources that are related to 
> one generic non-information resource?

That finding doesn't really apply. It is about representations of
Information Resources. The TAG has not ((yet) written much about
semantic web architecture. I think it should.

> Question 2: When the URIs are dreferenced they provide quite 
> different information about Tim, which reflects the knowledge and 
> the opinion of the specific URI owner about him. Within our 
> tutorial we need to talk about this information and therefore need 
> a term to refer to a concept that can be described as "information 
> provided by a specific URI owner about a non-information resource", 
> for example Tim. Depending on the answer to question 1, what would 
> be the correct Web Architecture term to refer to this concept? Or 
> is such a term missing?

I can't think of a term for "the information which you get about the
thing identified by it  when you look up a URI" which works for me.

  It has of course the term "Representation" which connects an
Information Resource and the (metadata, bits) pair which you get
back, which is different.

> Question 3: Depending on the answer to question 1, is it correct to 
> use owl:sameAs [6] to state that http://www.w3.org/People/Berners- 
> Lee/card#i and http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee refer to 
> the same thing as it is done in Tim's profile.

Yes.

>
> Any clarifications on these question would be highly welcomed.
>
> Cheers
>
> Chris
>
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
> [2] http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/ 
> LinkingOpenData
> [3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/httpRange-14/2007-05-31/ 
> HttpRange-14
> [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
> [5] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/alternatives-discovery.html
> [6] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#sameAs-def
>
> --
> Chris Bizer
> Freie Universität Berlin
> +49 30 838 54057
> chris@bizer.de
> www.bizer.de

Received on Wednesday, 25 July 2007 14:16:18 UTC