- From: Richard Light <richard@light.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:35:46 +0000
- To: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
- Cc: Christoph LANGE <ch.lange@jacobs-university.de>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, Vyacheslav Zholudev <v.zholudev@jacobs-university.de>, Florian Rabe <f.rabe@jacobs-university.de>
In message <4B605247.6030201@openlinksw.com>, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> writes >> And that mixing and matching Linked Data, Topic Maps and full-text >>XML (etc.) can potentially take us to some exciting new places. (But >>then that's hardly news. I remember discussing the value of URNs for >>this sort of purpose some time around 1994.) >I agree, and I am simply saying: Topics are Things too, and they can >exist in EAV/CR model relationship graphs. Sure. Has anyone actually tried that: storing assertions in a triple store, but treating them as a "virtual Topic Map"? It's an approach which might yield benefits - and there are possibly paradigms other than Topic Maps which could usefully be virtualized on top of triple-store data. >I think we are exhibiting semantic pedantry here based on our >individual world views, which is fine, since this is really what this >whole gig is supposed to facilitate :-) Not just semantic pedantry, Kingsley, fun though that is ;-) My inclusion, above, of full-text XML adds, I think, another dimension to this debate. In all of this clever flattening of heterogeneous data onto the level playing field which is RDF, we are enabling information retrieval: the answering of questions. And that's fine. The information that is flowing around and available to us in this context is all RDF: simple assertions. However, the user who originally asked the question might not be satisfied with this type of information: they might want a story, not facts. Where does the story come from? If each subject of discourse (whose URI we already know) can be delivered as full-text XML via the standard 303 redirection mechanism, that gives us one way of grabbing the full story in machine-processible form, and including whatever parts of it are relevant in our responses to questions. Best wishes, Richard -- Richard Light
Received on Thursday, 28 January 2010 09:37:25 UTC