- From: Benjamin Nowack <bnowack@semsol.com>
- Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:53:00 +0200
- To: semantic-web@w3c.org
- Cc: Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>, "public-lod@w3.org" <public-lod@w3.org>, Toby Inkster <tai@g5n.co.uk>
On 10.07.2009 10:53:32, Toby Inkster wrote: >What would it mean for the file to have a dc:created property? Would the >value of that property be my date of birth, or would it be the date I >first uploaded my data? > >The classic example is that if I use the same URL to represent myself >and my web page, then how can I state that I am the creator of my web >page without also asserting that I'm my own father. By simply using two different properties? These are the typical (and correct) arguments, but they are grounded in an AI/logics purism(?) that *maybe* shouldn't be taken too seriously on the public SemWeb. They are of course practically motivated as well, but the practitioner here is someone with a reasoning background, not necessarily a web developer in a web agency. We could most probably use Hugh's approach/idea and still solve all our practical problems. Why did we give URIs to properties? To tell us what types of resources they relate. They should support us, not restrict us. So, twitter:bengee is me (in Web 2.0 speak) The page has a creation date: twitter:bengee ex1:created "2007" . (ex1:created relates a document to a date) I have a birthday: twitter:bengee ex2:birthday "08-14" . (ex2:birthday relates an agent to a date) The page has a creator: twitter:bengee ex1:author twitter:bengee . (ex1:author relates a document to an agent) I have a father: twitter:bengee ex2:father "Bodo" . (ex2:father relates an agent to an agent) Now, this is totally blasphemic RDF *in our current view*, but heck would it make publishing easy. And with properly annotated properties, it would be easy to detect whether a term refers to a document or a NIR, and the syntax is pretty obvious about whether we are talking about a resource or the label of a resource. And hey, no more arguing about whether a vcard is a person or not. And we could get rid of our über-complicated XFN converters ;) Simple querying works easily, directly on the instance data, and ontologies could be used for more automatic disambiguation. So, dc:created can't tell you whether it refers to a person or a document? Predicate FAIL, not Subject fail, maybe? This is all rather tongue-in-cheek, of course, we've been here a couple of times, I'm happy with the current specs, and different URIs for NIRs and docs make a lot of sense, but we as a community should be prepared that people will just use their homepages and OpenIDs as direct identifiers (XFN, anyone?). Our apps will have to deal with the situation, and it's actually not too difficult to implement such a disambiguation step. When I read a blog post and drag an author link on my address book, I want to add a person, not a page, and my address book should not say "Ey dude, not a person" (well, would be cool if it could, though). Benji -- Benjamin Nowack http://bnode.org/ http://semsol.com/
Received on Friday, 10 July 2009 11:53:35 UTC