- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:06:56 -0400
- To: Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@gmail.com>
- Cc: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, public-lod@w3.org, semantic-web@w3.org
On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 14:43 -0400, Adrian Walker wrote: > Hi Pat, > > You wrote... > > ..how do we know, given some RDF, what semantic extensions are > appropriately to be used when interpreting it? That is a VERY good > question. This is something that RDF2 could most usefully tackle,... A fairly widely held view -- though I'm sure not universal -- is that the URIs used in the graph should signal the intended semantic extensions. For example, if you use an OWL predicate, then the OWL semantics for that predicate are intended. This is described in "PART 3: Determining Resource Identity" of "Resource Identity and Semantic Extensions: Making Sense of Ambiguity": http://dbooth.org/2010/ambiguity/#part3 HOWEVER, it is important to distinguish between the intent of the RDF statement author and what the RDF consumer chooses to do with the graph. It is critical that the RDF consumer be able to determine the intended semantics of the graph, i.e., to be able to know what entailments the RDF author intended. This is essence of successful communication. But this does *not* obligate the RDF consumer to actually *produce* all of those entailments. That is a choice that is entirely up to the RDF consumer and will vary by application. The question that you are asking has to do with the roles, responsibilities and expectations of the URI owner, RDF statement author and RDF consumer. I have proposed some standard guidelines in "The URI Lifecycle in Semantic Web Architecture": http://dbooth.org/2009/lifecycle/ There was some discussion at the RDF Next Steps workshop about having the next RDF working group tackle this issue, but the prevailing view was that it should not. Personally, I think this was because the issue is not yet well enough understood in the semantic web community as a whole. More education and discussion are needed first. -- David Booth, Ph.D. Cleveland Clinic (contractor) http://dbooth.org/ Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.
Received on Thursday, 8 July 2010 23:19:13 UTC