- From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
- Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2011 13:00:05 +0100
- To: public-lod@w3.org
On 6/12/11 11:12 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote: > Again, this strikes me as speaking from very little experience. I > spend a good deal of my time collaboratively developing ontologies and > working with users of them. I've yet to encounter a person who didn't > understand the difference between a book about Obama and Obama. Lin, The example expressed by Alan is the crux of the matter. People know the difference between 'Obama' and a 'Book' about him. Sadly, a narrative has been constructed that leads to a really problematic misconception, as time has proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Here is the problem, as I know it. We are using hyperlinks as a mechanism for data representation via HTTP URI based Names. The URI abstraction caters for two things: Names and Addresses. When trying to untangle the unintuitive nature of HTTP URIs as a Naming mechanism for Things (e.g., real world entities or objects), a narrative have emerged aimed at tacking the "hyperlink usage ambiguity problem" and its emerged in a manner expands the ambiguity to generality whereas this is just a function of Name mechanism choice. Inferring that only SemWeb, LOD, and W3C folks care about the difference between a 'Obama' and a 'Book' about him is a truly broken narrative. People are just confused about how hyperlinks are evolving from Addresses to Names i.e., putting to use the power inherent in the URI abstraction such that Names resolve to Representations of their Referents. Even worse, there's similar confusion (within LOD and SemWeb communitis) when the issue of Resolvable Names not based on HTTP enter the conversation. As I've stated repeatedly, a majority of programmers and computer scientists thoroughly understand the concepts of: de-reference (indirection), address-of, and graph based data structures. They just don't recognize what they already understand when reading W3C specs and most of the LOD and SemWeb narratives. -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen President& CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
Received on Sunday, 12 June 2011 12:00:28 UTC