Re: How do you deprecate URIs? Re: OWL-DL and linked data

2008/7/9 Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>:
> Bijan Parsia wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 9, 2008, at 1:48 AM, Peter Ansell wrote:
>> [snip]
>>>
>>> For the record, I am not trying to flame anyone, just trying to tease
>>> out usable alternatives,
>>
>> Then I would suggest not claiming that the people you are disputing with
>> are out of touch, unrealistic, fuddy-duddys.
>
> I probably introduced that theme into the conversation; sorry about that.
>
> I wrote "Call me old fashioned, but owl:sameAs means what it means as
> defined in the OWL specs." in
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Jul/0139.html
>
>
> In http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2008Jul/0146.html
> Peter writes:
>
>> Sorry, just trying to highlight the fact that a core group of semantic
>> type academics don't want to acknowledge or provide alternatives for a
>> gap which could, if warnings about not using owl:sameAs liberally are
>> real, actually break down the whole idea when one wants to move from
>> their little local ontology to a distributed semantic web.
>
> Peter, I hope you can see how this kind of language might be unhelpful.

Sorry :) I seem to cause a fuss wherever I go!

> In particular, stereotyping people as "academics" does nothing to further
> the collaboration that is essential to getting this semweb stuff rolled out.
> There is no shame in being academic or scholarly around here. Nor in reading
> books. Nor for that matter in working for a company.

I guess the fact that there are so many facets to the semantic web,
with OWL being only one of them might have brought that on. I have
been told on more than one occasion that consistent reasoning with
ontologies, and getting domain experts (ie,
biologists/bioinformaticians in my case) to actually model an ontology
is a pipe dream. I guess having the people that designed OWL not being
able to describe adverse consequeces to using sameAs in simple terms
brought some of it on. I apologise for that.

> I am also puzzled by the claim that it is the duty of this "core group of
> semantic type academics" to define the desired mapping language. We put a
> *lot* of effort into building a decentralised system here. Anyone can go and
> write up some new vocabulary.

Thats the goal I am hoping to achieve as a result of this discussion,
one or more predicates which can be used to highlight the range
between seeAlso and sameAs so that peope don't have to be afraid of
sameAs at one extreme due to its complex flow-on effects and can
understand a relationship more directly than the completely generic
seeAlso.

> Members of this mailing list (including Bijan and 100s of others) have
> varied experience working in academic, commercial, standards, opensource and
> many other settings. Reducing each other to one-dimensional stereotypes (the
> "ivory tower professor" etc.) does a huge disservice to the wealth of
> experience we have on this mailing list. Please do not do it. Acting like
> schoolkids is also a questionable use of bandwidth. Even when funny...
>
> This project (W3C RDF, OWL etc aka the 'Semantic Web' project) did not come
> from academia, it came originally from an industry-oriented standards body,
> addressing requirements drawing on content labelling, digital library and
> Webby activities through a technology (essentially MCF) that was submitted
> to W3C by a browser company, but which had intellectual heritage in the KR
> world. Which might go some way to explaining the eclectic salad of people,
> technology and ideas around here, and some of the communication challenges
> we face.
>
> Strong interest from the academic world came a few years into the RDF/SW
> project. But if you look at the people involved they have often been
> crossovers between a variety of worlds. RDF and OWL are without a doubt
> stronger, more robust and more ('realworld'-)deployable because of the
> contributions of people you might call "academic". Book-reading types. The
> version of RDF that shipped in 1999 was something of a mess: the spec was
> intriguing and evocative, but hard to understand and implement. Being
> poetically evocative is not something you generally want in an engineering
> spec. The specs we have now (and the addition of OWL) are some improvement
> on that, largely due to the collaboration we built between people from this
> list and nearby. Which is why I'll make a fuss if I see listmembers slip
> into stereotyping and cartoonish tribalism. We can do better...

I fell off the civility wagon. Do warn me if it happens again.

Cheers,

Peter

Received on Wednesday, 9 July 2008 21:30:21 UTC