Handling bad RDF descriptions

Pierre-Antoine CHAMPIN wrote:

> 3) About services
> Differentiating the URL and the URI of the service may be a good thing,
> but is it sufficient ?
> What about the service "http://www.cpe.fr/cgi-bin/rose"
> returning some classical piece of french poetry ?
> I can state
> 
>   <Description about="http://www.cpe.fr/cgi-bin/rose">
>     <author> Champin </author>
>     <language> Perl 5 </language>
>   </Description>
> 
> but the URL will return a documennt with some self-describing RDF inside
>     <author> Ronsard </author>
>     <form> Sonnet </form>
> what URL does this reffer, if not "http://www.cpe.fr/cgi-bin/rose" ??
> 
> QUESTION 3 : generally, an URI can have more than one meaning !
> (not only container/content or describee/description)
> How will we deal with that ?
> 
> PS : I'm sure the RDF community could provide me with half a dozen unambiguous URIs,
> one for the service, one for Ronsard's sonnet, and so on...
> But I'm not so sure all RDF users could agree on all that,
> so we WILL have to handle polysemy of URIs...

Yes. There should be one URI for the service and another URI for the
sonnet.  The service author could make this more intuitive by using
clear names:

  Service URI:  http://www.cpe.fr/cgi-bin/poetry

  Sonnet URI:	http://www.cpe.fr/cgi-bin/poetry?rose


I can imagine that there will be tons of confusingly mixed up, badly
thought out RDF descriptions of resources.  But I do think that
applications can be instructed to handle this in many ways.  Deduction
engines could be built to make intelligent guesses of how a more
complete and correct description would look like, based on faulty
descriptions.

By collecting many versions of the same thing and by using quality
ratings and other logic, useful information should be extracted.

And I hope that badly expressed descriptions will be substituted with
better versions. Anyone can do the rewrite. They will just have to
earn the public trust, to go on and be used instead of the original
descriptions.

This is the future role of the RDF-quality rating services.

-- 
/ Jonas  -  http://paranormal.o.se/perl/proj/rdf/schema_editor/

Received on Tuesday, 4 January 2000 15:21:47 UTC