- From: Ross Singer <rossfsinger@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 12:36:32 -0500
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: Simon Spero <ses@unc.edu>, Leonard Will <L.Will@willpowerinfo.co.uk>, Alexandre Passant <alexandre.passant@deri.org>, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>, dbpedia-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net, SKOS <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote: > Everything that is-about something is a document. > Everything that something is-about is a concept. > > My problem is that this second assertion is blatantly false. I have shelves > full of books that are not about concepts at all. Biographies are about > people, not (usually) concepts of people. So at this point, SKOS simply > vanishes into never-never land. I have no idea what it is talking about > (quite literally). I sort of disagree here, but, at the end of the day, I'm not sure it matters if I coin a skos:Concept "about" the person in the biography on your bookshelf and you refer to the resource representing him or her directly. Eventually, we'll figure out some way to link those two together and most people probably won't care that I think that the subject heading for the Grand Canyon (http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh85056381) is somehow describing some abstract "aboutness" of http://sws.geonames.org/6619202/ and not just the physical location. What I'm saying is that a Philosophy 101 debate is not going to derail the semantic web. If I think there's a Platonic ideal of William Shakespeare that Elizabethan scholars are actually writing about and you don't agree with that but the rest of my data and assertions are valuable enough to you, you'll figure out how to work it into your application and your worldview. -Ross.
Received on Friday, 6 November 2009 17:37:06 UTC