- From: William Waites <ww@styx.org>
- Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:03:27 +0100
- To: Patrick Durusau <patrick@durusau.net>
- Cc: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, Dave Reynolds <dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com>, "public-lod@w3.org" <public-lod@w3.org>
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 08:40:14AM -0500, Patrick Durusau wrote: > > Semantic ambiguity isn't going to go away. It is part and parcel of the > very act of communication. > > [...] > > Witness the lack of uniform semantics in the linked data community over > something as common as sameAs. As the linked data community expands, so > are the number of interpretations of sameAs. > > Why can't we fashion solutions for how we are rather than wishing for > solution for how we aren't? I was at a lecture by Dave Robertson [0] the other day where he talked about some of the ideas behind one of his current projects [1]. Particularly relevant was the idea of completely abandoning any attempts at global semantics and instead working on making sure the semantics are clear on a local communication channel (as I understood it). So maybe that would mean a different meaning for sameAs in different datasets, and that's just fine as long as the reader is aware of that and fasions some transformation from their notion of sameAs to their peer's, mutatis mutandis for other predicates and classes. In some ways this is similar to how we use language. If I'm talking to a computer scientist I'll use a different but overlapping sub-language of English than if I'm talking to the postman. If I'm talking to a non-native English speaker I'll modify my speech so as to be more easily understood. Around here, "tea" means "supper" but a short distance to the South it more likely means a snack with cakes and cucumber sandwiches. The important thing is a context of communication which modifies -- and disambiguates meaning. This might be touched on in the RDF Semantics with the not often mentioned idea of an interpretation of a graph. How does this square with the apparent tendency to want to treat statements as overarching universal truths? Cheers, -w [0] http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/groups/ssp/members/dave.htm [1] http://socialcomputer.eu/
Received on Friday, 12 November 2010 14:04:00 UTC