Re: owl:sameAs [recipe]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 7:58 AM, <bill.roberts@planet.nl> wrote:
> Alan - I agree with not creating new URIs unnecessarily,

It is worse than unnecessary. The statements made with them are too
often just plain wrong. They reflect poor understanding of knowledge
representation, of ontology, and of web architecture.

> but if you are
> setting up your own knowledge base on a topic and want to add new
> information about those resources, and you want the user to be able to
> dereference the resource URI to find that information, then it seems to me
> that you pretty quickly get to the point where you have a decent reason to
> create your own URIs.

Sure, for some other kind of thing than Authors - for resources that
are information *about* authors. If you do this you should say so. (in
your RDF). By using foaf:primaryTopic in my rewrite of the recipe I
said this explicitly.

> This will of course lead over time to a lot of owl:sameAs links all over the
> place, but I think we just have to deal with that.

We don't and I predict we won't. This practice will be a dead end. At
least for purposes of the using the semantic web in a different way
than the document web. I don't think we need another shadow web that
is the same as what we have already. We need a supplement to the
document web that lets us do new, novel things, or that lets us do
things that are too hard to do with existing tech.

> Without wanting to re-open an old thread, I broadly agree with Richard
> Cyganiak's viewpoint in
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2009Feb/0010.html

And I do not, of course. That thread shows a distinct lack of vision,
as well as a clear lack of experience in actually depending on
knowledge representation to do anything of importance.

-Alan

>
> Cheers
> Bill
>
> ________________________________
> Van: public-lod-request@w3.org namens Alan Ruttenberg
> Verzonden: di 28-7-2009 3:47
> Aan: Eric Lease Morgan
> CC: public-lod@w3.org
> Onderwerp: Re: owl:sameAs [recipe]
>
>
>> --
>
> Sorry to be critical, but there is an important principle here: First
> do no harm. Willy nilly inventing URIs and entities when there are
> perfectly good ones in existence is not "cool" from a semweb point of
> view, and unnecessary use of sameAs is both burdensome and likely to
> lead to gross errors, as I have pointed out in my previous emails.
>
> -Alan
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 28 July 2009 14:03:44 UTC