Re: "shape" as a relationship, not a class

In library data we do run into a problem of "what does the URI identify"
- and I don't think the philosophical distinction of RWO is necessary to
understand this.

My metadata describes a book. A book has an author, a title, various
topics. There is a URI that identifies the book that is the subject of
those triples. I also want to say when the metadata was created and by
whom. That requires a different URI because the subject is different -
the subject is the metadata, not the book itself. The cataloger who
creates the metadata is not the creator of the book; the title is the
title of the book, not the title of the metadata. Because the URI rule
is that each URI identifies one and only one "thing", I need separate
URIs for these two things.

This becomes more difficult when you use the same URI for both, as is
often the case with web pages. But the principle is the same -- it's the
difference between what the web page is ABOUT and the web page itself.
Those are two different things, and the fact that the whole http
range-14 thing was developed to respond to that shows me that the web
page "case" has some particular problems. But I clearly could need to
distinguish between Alice and the metadata or web page about Alice. The
date of the creation of the DMV record about Alice is not the same as
the data of creation of Alice. The creator of the post to a Facebook
page is not the creator of Alice.

I see this not as a question of which is the RWO, but what is the
subject of the data. That sidesteps the philosophical issue, and in my
mind the distinction is usually quite easy to define.

kc

On 2/20/15 8:49 AM, Irene Polikoff wrote:
> Thanks Harold. Unfortunately, it doesn＊t. I must be very dense :)
> 
> I＊ve read this before - many times. One reason this doesn＊t do anything
> for me is that I see the distinctions described here as trivial,
> uninteresting and not realistic.
> 
> In the information world (and this is what we are dealing with here - bits
> and bytes), we never deal with the real, living and breathing Alice. We
> can＊t. We are dealing with some digital identifier of Alice＊s information
> record. Information about Alice can be contained in multiple places - her
> employer has some data about her, IRS (if she leaves in the US) has some
> data about her, DMV has some data about her and so on. All these systems
> have some data validation constraints. One may require that there must be
> a phone number, another one doesn＊t. These are not web documents - yet
> they have strong data quality requirements.
> 
> Also, there is not a single home page that renders some information about
> Alice. She could have her own web site or a blog. She could also have a
> Facebook page and a LinkedIn page. Her employer may have a web page for
> her on their web site. Some pages may be static, some may be generated
> from the information in some database that has a set of records (or even
> RDF triples) about Alice. The pages could have some constraints, but they
> are not in any way more likely to have constraints than the underlying
> data.
> 
> The question for me remains, so what? What is the ※therefore§?
> 
> Irene
> 
> On 2/20/15, 11:17 AM, "Solbrig, Harold R." <Solbrig.Harold@mayo.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Would:
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/#semweb
>>
>> Help?
>>
>> Section 3.1 describes the situation: "Bob may not like the look of the
>> homepage, but fancy
>> the person Alice. So two URIs are needed, one for Alice, one for the
>> homepage or
>> a RDF document describing Alice."
>>
>> Paraphrasing, "I may thank that the shape of Alice's (RDF) home page does
>> not conform to my requirements.  This is NOT about Alice, it is about the
>> description"
>>
>>
>> On 2/20/15, 9:53 AM, "Irene Polikoff" <irene@topquadrant.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I believe that 昆real word object昌 in the Semantic Web speak doesn易t mean
>>> that it has a physical representation. It is also a concept.
>>>
>>> In that sense, a user account is as much of a real world thing as a
>>> person. One can create a class User Account to say that a user account
>>> can
>>> be created by someone (system administrator), that it has valid from and
>>> to dates and that it is an account of some person, etc.
>>>
>>> As for web documents, there can be a web document presenting information
>>> about a person as much as there can be a web document presenting
>>> information about a user account. And there could be multiple ways to
>>> render information about either a person or a user account.
>>>
>>> I have to say that while conceptually I understand the distinction
>>> between
>>> 昆real things昌 and 昆information resources昌, I still don易t understand the
>>> practical application of the distinction after much reading. To me, the
>>> distinction has to do with some very particular viewpoint that is
>>> somewhat
>>> esoteric. After all, we are dealing with the world of data and software.
>>> We can易t process anything, but information.
>>>
>>> Since I was struggling with this, I thought that may be making this
>>> distinction is really important for dereferencing (not that other, non
>>> Semantic Web systems don易t display web documents) and I am missing some
>>> technical knowledge to get the 昆aha昌. So, a year ago I易ve asked three
>>> separate senior developers/technical architects who had shallow exposure
>>> to RDF but didn易t come from the Semantic Web community to read on this
>>> subject and tell me if they understood it and could explain it. All three
>>> couldn易t make sense of it. They just thought it was irrelevant. These
>>> folks are all fairly bright and capable with 7 or more years of technical
>>> experience.
>>>
>>> This is a limited experiment, for sure, but so far it confirms Holger易s
>>> view that this is not something people care about or need to understand.
>>>
>>> Irene
>>>
>>> On 2/20/15, 10:15 AM, "Arthur Ryman" <ryman@ca.ibm.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Holger Knublauch <holger@topquadrant.com> wrote on 02/08/2015 05:36:32
>>>> PM:
>>>>
>>>>> ... I am afraid the distinction
>>>>> between real-world objects and their representation drifts into
>>>>> theoretical realms that nobody outside of the RDF world seems to care
>>>>> about (and rightfully so).
>>>>
>>>> Holger,
>>>>
>>>> The distinction is important in some cases because if you fail to make
>>>> the
>>>> distinction, then when you read the RDF, it sounds like nonsense. The
>>>> classic example is the distinction between a person and a user account
>>>> owned by that person. A person is a RWO and should have a URI that is
>>>> different that the user account, which is an information resource (a web
>>>> document).
>>>>
>>>> A web document can have properties such as creator (a person), creation
>>>> date, modification date, etc. It makes sense to say that a user account
>>>> document has a modification date, but it is nonsense to say that the
>>>> person who owns the user account has that modification date (barring
>>>> coincidental plastic surgery on that date). FOAF makes this clear. This
>>>> whole topic is nicely discussed in [1], which is co-authored by your
>>>> newest colleague.
>>>>
>>>> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet/+1-510-984-3600

Received on Saturday, 21 February 2015 16:41:33 UTC