- From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
- Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:51:13 -0400
- To: Matthias Samwald <samwald@gmx.at>
- CC: public-lod@w3.org, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>
Matthias Samwald wrote: > Kingsley wrote: >> A Web of Data is a Web of Data Objects. The Document Web is a Web of >> Documents. > > But are "data objects" not just another layer of abstraction? RDF/OWL > gives us the possibility to use URIs and ontologies to describe the > things we are interested in (districts, people, protein sequences) > without taking detours through thinking in terms of documents, data > sets, conceptualisation and other abstractions. When we say that > <http://example1.org/john_doe> owl:sameAs > <http://example2.org/john_doe>, this is a statement about an object in > reality, and not a data object (and, of course, not about a document > either). Maybe this is just a matter of semantics, and with "data > objects" you were actually referring to these objects in reality. For > me, the term "data" is strongly associated with artefacts in our > computer systems, and not objects in reality. Objects are vehicles of Data Access (by value or reference). Objects/Entities are instances of Classes. At the very least <http://example2.org/john_doe> is an instance of a owl:Thing even before we get to foaf:Person. Anyway, you raise an interesting point as you've given me a reminder to share the following with anyone confused or unsure about Distributed Objects and the Web. Read: http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/9703-web-apps-essay.html Kingsley > >> We have to do a better job of explaining what Object Identity is about >> in the context of the Linekd Data Web, especially as this is an area of >> computer science that predates the Web. > > I think foundational ontologies such as DOLCE [1] and BFO [2] could be > of great utility for clarifying how identities of objects and classes > are defined. I guess that such 'strict' approaches to ontology > engineering are currently not very popular in the LOD community, but I > think that their value will soon be recognized when the LOD dataset > cloud grows -- and more and more questions about the actual meaning of > 'sameAs' and 'equivalentClass' arise. At least, this was the case with > the complex RDF/OWL datasets we are dealing with in the life science > and health care community [3]. > > [1] http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html > [2] http://www.ifomis.org/bfo > [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/hcls-kb/ > > Cheers, > Matthias Samwald > Semantic Web Company, Austria // DERI Galway, Ireland > http://www.semantic-web.at/ > http://www.deri.ie/ > > > -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen President & CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Received on Thursday, 17 April 2008 11:51:49 UTC