RE: owl:sameAs [recipe]

Hi Alan
 
Just to check I understand your point- because it's perfectly possible I am missing something important :-)  I'm asking for clarification here, not making a counter-argument.
 
The "standard" Linked Data approach, as I understand it, is to assign HTTP URIs to non-information resources, ie actual things like authors, and to allow dereferencing of those URIs to return an information resource (eg a bunch of RDF triples) about the thing identified by that URI.  One approach to different data publishers having their own data on the non-information resource is for them to assign their own URI for it in a domain that they control and respond appropriately to requests to that URI.
 
Is your recommendation that publisher A and publisher B both publish their own information resources, using their own URIs of course, and to state in their RDF that those information resources are about (foaf:primaryTopic of) the relevant non-information resource (eg http://dbpedia.org/resource/Thomas_More from the original post) ?  
 
In many ways this makes a lot of sense to me - but it appears to break the 'browseable graph'  aspect of linked data, or at least that publisher A loses the ability to control or contribute to what a user gets if he follows a link to a non-information resource URI in someone else's domain.  ie if the dbpedia Thomas More appears in publisher A's graph and the user (or user agent) dereferences it, then they get the dbpedia information about Thomas More, not publisher A's information about Thomas More.  Of course, that browseability is not the only thing to consider and publisher A's information about Thomas More could be found by the user through a search engine.
 
Cheers
 
Bill

 
________________________________

Van: Alan Ruttenberg [mailto:alanruttenberg@gmail.com]
Verzonden: di 28-7-2009 16:02
Aan: bill.roberts@planet.nl
CC: public-lod@w3.org
Onderwerp: 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
>
>