Re: Schema.org in RDF ...

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