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

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 2:45 PM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> 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.

Then if someone treats them as the same, in a human-occupied forum,
correct them instead of sanctioning their use. And don't call the
result of their use "full fidelity".

> 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

And I disagree. There is always the obligation to think. And where
there are what seem to be inconsistencies between what is said in
english and what is said in logic the responsibility should be to
communicate with the author and work with them to improve the
correspondence.

> 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.

As I have said previously, there is a social contract we are trying to
establish, and this advise undermines it. In any case, the denial of
obligation feels out of place. Obligation, afaik, doesn't play a role
in any of the specification that we work with. Yet. If you want to
propose this, then present it as a proposal, not as *the
architecture*.

> 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.

I have offered above what I consider to be good practice. I see your
advise as "stick to the letter of the law, not the spirit".

-Alan

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2011 21:52:27 UTC