RE: URI Patterns (was RE: MARC Codes for Forms of Musical Composition)

Kendall,

I'll try to limit myself to one overstatement per message in the future. :-)

I sympathize with the confusion and no-doubt frustration I've caused with my arguments. Some (all?) of them were poorly constructed. In case you missed it, I'm willing to believe that a chocolate cake and a book could be owl:sameAs while being skeptical about a bibo:Book and a frbr:Manifestation. I'm not sure how to deal with the fact that some of us (presumably) care about splitting these hairs and some don't.

My skepticism about identity *is* metaphysical (no doubt influenced by OpenURL) and yet I believe that concepts and identity are unavoidable. Here's my overstatement for this message. The only reason I understand a word anyone says is because of OWL. To the extent people abuse owl:sameAs, I get confused.

Jeff

-----Original Message-----
From: Kendall Clark [mailto:kendall@clarkparsia.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 9:35 AM
To: Young,Jeff (OR)
Cc: Martin Malmsten; public-lld
Subject: Re: URI Patterns (was RE: MARC Codes for Forms of Musical Composition)

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Young,Jeff (OR) <jyoung@oclc.org> wrote:
> Martin,
>
> I honestly agree. People shouldn't let owl:sameAs or this discussion scare them off from doing something. Individual and community understanding improves and/or changes over time. Nothing is ever written in stone, including identity. If people have a minute, though, they should consider using umbel:isLike as a default because it is always safe, unlike owl:sameAs.
>

Hi,

This is perhaps overstated, no?

umbel:isLike may always be safe; but that doesn't mean it's always
useful. In cases where you want equality of individuals inference to
occur, umbel:isLike doesn't help at all.  You may not get wrong
inferences w/ umbel:isLike, but that's because you won't get any
(unless someone writes custom code or rules to do some kind of
reasoning with umbel:isLike -- but, then, what would that code or
those rules do?).

Yr skepticism about identity ("nothing is ever written in stone,
including identity") sounds more like a philosophical position than a
best practice with respect to information management. One of the key
strengths of OWL and Linked Data generally is data integration, where
we often have multiple data sources, each of which stores info about
some aspect of a collection of shared instances. In those cases, it's
perfectly reasonable to relate, merge, or align records across
information systems using owl:sameAs.

No one wants anyone to be scared by owl:sameAs -- this is kind of a
funny notion, if you think about it -- but we shouldn't throw the baby
out with the bathwater. ;>

Cheers,
Kendall Clark

Received on Friday, 9 July 2010 21:04:58 UTC