Re: Comments on Section 3

On Thu, Apr 10, 2003 at 01:40:42PM -0400, Nick Matsakis wrote:
> Section 3.2.7 discusses naming.  Not to add more to the plate, but we may
> wish to address the question of distributed naming to some degree.  Unique
> names are typically doled out by centralized authorities (e.g. social
> security numbers, ISBN numbers, domain names...).  However, how does one
> locally come up with a name for a global resource? For example, suppose
> two libraries cataloged photographs of the Effiel Tower.  How do they name
> "The Effiel Tower" in such a way that a user looking for photographs of
> the tower can find them? Or, if a community such as the architecture dept.
> has a name authority for things like buildings, how do other communities
> discover it?
> 

I think you are actually describing a search problem, not a naming 
problem.  The names can be relatively arbitrary if you have a way to
search for the owner of record 'http://www.tour-eiffel.fr/teiffel/uk/', 
for the record on the 'Tour d'Eiffel', using the misspelled and 
translated 'The Effiel Tower'.  Google provides such a function on 
the web, but without any way to determine the authoritativeness of 
the pages it scans, it depends on page link heuristics to assess 
appropriateness.

Having found the owner of record, you can then reasonably assume that
the URL published by that owner should be the common reference point
for that subject.

> 3.5.1 I'm not sure I follow the example of "I have lots of instances.
> Please suggest a schema".  how can we specify instances to the computer
> without some schema?  I think the problem is really one of bootstrapping;
> we may have a set of instances implicited labelled with some weak schema
> such as "text files" and may want to promote them to a more specific or
> powerful schema (email messages, citations, addresses).
> 

The problem assumes that you have metadata in schemaless RDF.  Identifying
close matches to existing schemas would have to be heuristic.  For a badly
formed example, think of the annoying MS Word Assistant's attempt to make 
you write every document in the form of a letter.

(This feature wouldn't be as annoying if it didn't both interrupt your 
workflow, and tell you things that you were quite capable of doing yourself
if you wanted to.)
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Received on Monday, 14 April 2003 12:24:30 UTC