- From: Li Ding <dingl@cs.rpi.edu>
- Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 13:57:16 -0400
- To: Wolfgang Orthuber <orthuber@kfo-zmk.uni-kiel.de>
- Cc: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, semantic-web@w3.org
> If there is no explicit official standard and recommendation for such global > task sharing, there is the > danger that those who need a special vocabulary develop many incompatible > standards for exchange of machine > readable data. > > The earlier such a standard for well defined task sharing is recommended by > W3C, the easier it can be > introduced. well, we can learn from the past: (i) biomedical terminologies are systematically maintained and probably globalized - I would say such terms are maintained via standardization processes. recent advance of DOI allows use to assign an official URI for a publication. so does DNS. (ii) English is evolving by daily life usage (that just reminded me an earlier mail by Jeremy on "live meaning and dead languages") - this is case for a social vocabulary development As mentioned in the previous email, standardization and social evolution are useful and somehow complementary. However, they are more or less an approach to the goal, which has been discussed in previous email: * given an URI in browser, a user really need to get it resolved (i.e. be able to fetch its definition) , whether using the namespace of the URI or use a search engine is just an option to the browser. * knowing the ownership will be helpful for users to trust the description of URI. The coexistence of exclusive ownership (standardization model) or shared ownership (social wikipedia model) are complementary solutions. As David said, social evolution could be "dirty", but it also looks good: * it is really not an easy job for one to maintain a comprehensive description of URI for a long time (hard drive may crash, money may run out, interests may switch, language may change). In addition to the exclusive ownership for important concepts, open source style social development should help too. so why not allow multiple ownership for one URI * the web is open, how can we help end users to pick one from the multiple URIs referring to the same concept. so why not use social ranking (where ownership may play an important role) to enable the Darwin evolution. -- Li Ding http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~dingl/
Received on Monday, 18 May 2009 17:57:53 UTC