Re: Semantic web architectural requirement [was Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle]

On Wed, 2011-06-22 at 03:24 -0400, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
> [ . . . ]
>  David wants us to believe that the writers of foaf,
> having omitted a disjointness axiom between documents and people, have
> deliberately sanctioned that they can be equated, solely based on that
> omission, and immune from analysis of any text or discussion that has
> been written on the matter.

Well . . . not quite.  I'm not saying that the FOAF authors have
sanctioned this.  Indeed, they may well wish that RDF statement authors
would treat foaf:Document and foaf:Person as disjoint.

I'm saying that RDF statement authors have no *obligation* to consider
anything beyond what is stated formally in the FOAF ontology.  I.e., as
long as the RDF statement author uses the FOAF URIs in a manner that is
consistent with the formal statements in the FOAF ontology and its
ontological closure (i.e., the transitive closure of the URI
declarations of all URIs that it uses), then the RDF author has met
his/her architectural obligation.  See Statement Author responsibilities
#3 and #4:
http://dbooth.org/2009/lifecycle/#resp3
http://dbooth.org/2009/lifecycle/#resp4

It would be *nice* if the RDF statement author read beyond the formal
statements to further divine the FOAF URI owners' intent, and the
statement author might be able to produce more useful data by doing so,
but the statement author has no *obligation* to do so.

Again, the reasons for not requiring the statement author to read beyond
the formal statements are that: (a) reading beyond the formal statements
cannot be readily automated; and (b) different parties are likely to
interpret the URI owner's intent differently.  


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 18:46:10 UTC