Re: frad:Person and foaf:Person

On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 11:29 AM, Richard Light
<richard@light.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> In message <AANLkTi=cNMx-aFdp7+_ed_hCPxJ5OeshKAjJ2ePrz4GG@mail.gmail.com>,
> Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> writes
>>
>> The original Linked Data note at
>> http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html was a gentle critique
>> of this idiom, basically saying "give the people http URIs too!". And
>> we did!
>
> With the emphasis on "too": a LD URI is simply a peg on which you can easily
> hang a bunch of assertions.  Without those assertions (a) it's not giving
> you anything useful and (b) you have no means of deciding whether "your"
> Richard Light URI refers to the same person as "my" Richard Light URI.

Yes, exactly. "Belt and braces". The more information we have, the
better. I like the 'peg' metaphor. Bnode-heavy RDF lacks those pegs,
which makes it harder for others to overlay related info by publishing
RDF elsewhere.

>> I still have some concerns about the practice of declaring URIs for
>> other people, especially living (non-technical!) ones, unless they are
>> given some clear 'right of reply' if the associated descriptions are
>> inaccurate.
>
> Well, the source of a published URI is clear through the domain registration
> system, so surely the same remedies are available as for any other
> publication medium?

Most end users don't understand the difference between the concepts of
'browser' and 'search engine'. So they're not going to understand
domain names any time soon. I agree the information is trackable if
you're an expert. The trouble is that RDF is designed to flow around
the network and get re-used.

Take for example the page
http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/0ca53fff-3b07-49eb-bcb9-bbe84f1ec768
(or append .rdf to that URL to get RDF/XML). The RDF there came from
MusicBrainz originally. This stuff flows around the network in ways
that aren't always easy to track. The pre-LOD notion of de-referencing
a URI had some sense that you were getting an 'authoritative
description' of the thing by fetching it, ... asking it for a
self-description. When the URI is assigned by one party about another,
that notion of self-description goes away. That's my continuing mild
discomfort with the idea that it's OK to propagate
"http://danbri.org/example.rdf#richard_light is a URI for Richard
Light", since it might be mistaken for Richard Light's 'official'
self-description. At the moment most LOD RDF is published in good
faith; if it ever goes truly mainstream, that will change and it'll be
spammed and malware'd like the rest of the Web. So we need to start
thinking now about how to distinguish these different notions of
authority. Which hopefully brings this mail back on topic, since
authority control and being good-faith public sector information
authorities is something the library world cares about...

cheers,

Dan

> Also, I don't see a scenario occurring where everyone self-publishes their
> "official" URI and associated properties, so I think we are left with this
> situation and just have to deal with it.
>
>> But in the general case there's no doubt that the Linked
>> Data emphasis on URIs everywhere was a leap forward; data merging
>> based on identifying properties is a huge pain. If we can get a URI
>> for each node, a lot of things become simpler.
>
> At some stage the tedious "comparing of properties" task still crops up,
> e.g. when deciding whether two URIs reference the same concept.
>
> Richard
> --
> Richard Light
>

Received on Monday, 1 November 2010 10:42:16 UTC