Re: Managing Co-reference (Was: A Semantic Elephant?)

Aldo,

Please keep your facts straight.

On 14 May 2008, at 22:24, Aldo Gangemi wrote:
> owl:sameAs is great to co-reference persons, places, etc. It is  
> buggy when used to relate e.g. foaf:Person
> instances to persons' homepages,

I would like to point out that I haven't come across any instance  
where this has been done or encouraged.

> or a city as from Cyc to a wikipedia article of that city (as done  
> in DBpedia).

DBpedia doesn't contain any owl:sameAs statements between Cyc  
resources and Wikipedia articles.

[snip]
> It is reasonable, as Richard Cyganiak wrote at the time, that we  
> have to work around the quirks [2], nonetheless, if there is no real  
> need, why should we work around the quirks caused by a pointless  
> identity assumption?

I feel misquoted. In the original discussion [1], I encouraged the use  
of owl:sameAs between three different definitions (Geonames, GEMET and  
DBpedia) of the concept of a “canal”. I did *not* advocate to gloss  
over the difference between a thing and a document about that thing,  
as you imply by your examples above. To the contrary, I have insisted  
on this difference many times, e.g. in [2].

At the end of the day, we have to keep in mind that we are talking  
about the Web. Statements will be subjective, inconsistent and wrong.  
This also applies to owl:sameAs statements. They are claims, not  
facts. Deal with it.

Best,
Richard

[1] http://simile.mit.edu/mail/ReadMsg?listName=Linking%20Open%20Data&msgId=14215
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

> Notice that ignoring owl:sameAs is not a good solution. We need some  
> trade-off between simplicity
> and formality. A basic similarity relation is perfect, and then  
> those triples can be worked out automatically,
> by means of appropriate metamodels, e.g. as proposed in [3].
>
> Aldo
>
> [1] Bernard Vatant suggested some good practice of mutual linking:
> http://universimmedia.blogspot.com/2007/07/using-owlsameas-in-linked-data.html
>
> [2] Cyganiak quote:
>> People who want to re-use your data will learn to work around its  
>> quirks and idiosyncrasies.
>> Dealing with the quirks is a part of re-using data, it always was,  
>> and it always will be.
>>
>
> [3] http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/irw2006/vpresutti.pdf from IRW  
> workshop: http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/irw2006/
>
>
> _________________________________
>
> Aldo Gangemi
>
> Senior Researcher
> Laboratory for Applied Ontology
> Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technology
> National Research Council (ISTC-CNR)
> Via Nomentana 56, 00161, Roma, Italy
> Tel: +390644161535
> Fax: +390644161513
> aldo.gangemi@cnr.it
>
> http://www.loa-cnr.it/gangemi.html
>
> icq# 108370336
>
> skype aldogangemi
>
>

Received on Thursday, 15 May 2008 10:22:40 UTC