Re: does RDF require understanding all 82 URI schemes?

At 11:15 01/02/12 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>Dan Connolly writes:

>  Lots of people expect that
>  > the best place to find info about
>  >      http://example.org/foo#bar
>  > is, in fact, http://example.org/foo#bar
>
>Who owns the thing being discussed?  Let's say that I want to publish
>information about the Battle of Jutland.  If I use the identifier
>
>   http://www.megginson.com/battles.rdf#jutland
>
>I've left anyone else who wants to describe the same battle with a
>choice between two miserable alternatives:
>
>1. use the same identifier, and eternally privilege my information
>over anyone else's; or
>
>2. use a different identifier, and lose any easy possibility of
>collating the information.
>
>Yech.

The answer to this was obvious to me two seconds after reading
through your complaints. And then in the next mail showed that
it already exists:

 > <#x>
 >   daml:equivalentTo
 >   http://www.megginson.com/battles.rdf#jutland

I think you have quite some important experience that we all can
learn from, but please don't blow it with such 'problems' than
can be solved in a few seconds.



>  > > no one's statements
>  > > should be privileged,
>  >
>  > Why not? If you want to know what my favorite color is,
>  > surely an answer from me is privileged over an answer
>  > from, say, someone who hardly knows me.
>
>That's a question that can be answered only on a property-by-property
>basis -- you're a reasonable authority on your favorite colour, but
>the W3C is a better authority on whether you're in its employ, and
>WWW10, on whether you're a speaker.  Subjective statements (Dan
>Connolly is/is not intelligent, good looking, interesting, a good
>coder, etc. etc.)  rightly belong to no single authority, though we'd
>be likely to privilege *any* other authority over the person himself.

Good point. Any problem? Probably not. Make the information about
whether to trust the URI itself or something else part of the
information about the property, and/or of other information about
which information is trustworthy.


>In summary, it probably makes sense to treat
>http://www.danconnolly.org/about.rdf as an authority for the specific
>case of Dan's favorite colour, but not for many other things.
>Encouraging resolution of RDF resource identifier URIs is wrong for
>the general case.
>
>All of these problems arise even with something -- a living human
>being -- that has an obvious, legally-enforceable identity.  Many
>(most?) of the things we'll want to describe in a data-based Web --
>ideas, historical people/places/things, etc. -- don't even have that.

Do they need that? Maybe not. In everyday language, we never
use social security numbers. The identity of the objects we speak
about is part of the web of language, not outside of it.


>I've written a couple of big chunks of it, and I'm afraid it's neither
>robust nor interoperable, though I've done my best.  The inability to
>round-trip a Namespace URI is the killer.

Can you be more specific? What do you mean with 'round-trip'?

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Monday, 12 February 2001 20:28:01 UTC