Re: Semantic Web Interest Group now closed

>From Camus, "because as he framed it "naming things badly adds to the
misfortune of the world"." That is a biblical reference, or sort of
anti-reference, too.Well it's an interesting and delightful discussion. I find
it funny that people are thinking to rename the list, I very much like the name
it has!But if you will excuse the whimsy, how about w3, then it would be 
w3@w3.org. I'm making mischief. You know that Gavin Woodhttp://gavwood.com/
 claims to have coined the term web 3? "I came up with the terms 'web three' and
'allegality'."He manages make 2014 seem such a long time ago!Anyway, this
touches on many issues: naming, appropriation, reappropriation, truth, lies,
falsehood.I'm not meaning to poke great fun at Gavin Wood apart from so as to
say I believe there are lies and serious lies. Serious lies are those to do with
our own personal psychology.Surely, I can see that all of this is for another
discussion.Still, we can speak truly and we can speak falsely, we can name
correctly and we can name incorrectly.How interesting then the allusion to the
"outerverse", the objective or outer mind of the deity where names are just
given.Working in the semantic web people know that names and concepts are not
"just given". Where do they come from, how are they established? Can an AI help,
perhaps working with the most carefully crafted ontology, or was that even ever
the aim?I think not, however the discussion doesn't end here ….
Adam

Adam Saltiel







On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 1:54 PM, Nicolas Chauvat nicolas.chauvat@logilab.fr  wrote:
On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 02:09:48PM -0700, Dan Brickley wrote:

> May I gently suggest that the name isn't the core problem here?




In my opinion, the core problem the Web is trying to solve is "How

could we share the things we have in our computers in a way that is

interoperable and as simple as it could be ?".




URLs being names for the things we share on the Web, I would argue

that names are at the core of the Web and that the great advance of

the Web was to embody the idea of hypertext by building on the already

working Domain Name System (names again).




RDF is a special case among the languages that are used to share data

over the Web because its uses web-enabled names (URLs) to encode the

data. It is like sending a text to someone after annotating each and

every single word with its entry in a specific edition of a

dictionnary. Say good bye to polysemy and hello to immediate lookup of

definitions.




That core problem stated, I can't help thinking with

https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q34670 that naming is very important

in any thought process, because as he framed it "naming things badly

adds to the misfortune of the world".




And what we are doing on this list if not thinking about and designing

the tools to solve the above problem ? If we can agree on the right

names for the different parts of the Semantic Web we have been

designing, I believe we are making progress.




-- 

Nicolas Chauvat




logilab.fr - services en informatique scientifique et gestion de connaissances