Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle [was Re: Schema.org in RDF ...]

Perhaps what we need to start worrying about is getting some test cases 
-- or a big pile of real (shonky) data to extract useful facts from...

Would it be worth starting a collection of data which makes sense to 
humans but isn't strictly semanticly clear?

William Waites wrote:
> * [2011-06-12 22:52:18 -0700] Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> écrit:
>
> ] OK, I am now completely and utterly lost. I have no idea what you 
> ] are saying or how any of it is relevant to the http-range-14 issue.
> ] Want to try running it past me again? Bear in mind that I do not
> ] accept your claim that a description of something is in any useful
> ] sense isomorphic to the thing it describes. As in, some RDF describing,
> ] say, the Eiffel tower is not in any way isomorphic to the actual
> ] tower. (I also do not understand why you think this claim matters,
> ] by the way.) 
>
> So in the previous email, Danny used the important word - relevant.
> Let's unpack that a little bit. Suppose we have no range-14 and all
> these RDF statements out there are all mixed up about what they refer
> to. Well, not completely mixed up. They're kind of clumped together,
> web pages and the things they are about tend to get confused but
> probably the chain of inferences that lead you to believe that the
> Eiffel tower is a dog is pretty unlikely.
>
> So there is some relationship between a description of the Eiffel
> tower and the tower itself. The relationship is akin to similarity in
> a very specific way - they are similar enough that someone thought it
> made sense to write down that the tower was 356m tall. Unfortunately
> they got confused and wrote down that the web page was 356m tall. No
> matter, they are still different enough in the relevant ways that
> anyone interested in heights on the order of hundreds of meters is
> unlikely to be confused.
>
> Same with the dog. Is the distinction between the dog and the picture
> important to me? Maybe, maybe not. It depends what I'm trying to do.
> If I want to make sure that I can recognise the doc when I meet her,
> a picture or the actual dog might do equally well.
>
> So that's the thing, similar or different in the relevant respects for
> the purpose at hand. The purpose at hand is necessary to figure out
> relevance. Just deriving all the possible things that can be entailed
> from the information you have is no good. You have to derive the
> relevant things in a particular context. You have to throw out givens
> that are irrelevant to you or that lead you to irrelevant or
> nonsensical entailments.
>
> In the general case this is hard. It's not even clear if it is
> relevance understood like this is computable. The intent of the user
> is so clearly in the loop providing a reference frame for evaluating
> relevance and capturing and representing a user's intent is not
> something we have a good way of doing apart from hand-crafting
> interactions.
>
> Is it doable in simple cases (with rules programmed by humans) like
> figuring out the foaf:knows graph where people and their homepages
> can just be merged without too many bad side-effects.
>
> We need a different kind of rule here - a cut rule. That says if
> some condition obtains, *remove* some statements. For example,
> remove all { ?doc a foaf:Document } before running the productive
> rules might be a common one where we know that we aren't interested
> in information resources.
>
> Cheers,
> -w
>
>   

-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/

Received on Monday, 13 June 2011 21:37:50 UTC