Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

On Mon, 2011-06-13 at 12:41 +0100, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
[ . . . ]
> Being useful trumps making semantic sense. The web succeeded *because*
> it conflates name and address. The web of data will succeed *because*
> it conflates a thing and a web page about the thing.

+1, except to point out that the notion of absolute semantic correctness
is a fallacy: semantic correctness is *relative* to the application.
What is semantically correct for one application may be incorrect for
another.  See myth #4 in "Resource Identity and Semantic Extensions:
Making Sense of Ambiguity":
http://dbooth.org/2010/ambiguity/paper.html#myth4

> 
> <http://richard.cyganiak.de/>
>     a foaf:Document;
>     dc:title "Richard Cyganiak's homepage";
>     a foaf:Person;
>     foaf:name "Richard Cyganiak";
>     owl:sameAs <http://twitter.com/cygri>;
>     .

That should be fine for applications that do not need to distinguish
between foaf:Documents and foaf:Persons . . . which is a large class of
applications.  OTOH, there *are* applications that need to distinguish
between foaf:Documents and foaf:Persons.  *Those* applications will need
to apply disambiguation techniques, and some of their owners will
(wrongly) blame you for the perceived "extra" work it causes them --
"extra" only because they happen to be implementing a different class of
application than your data best supports.


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2011 00:38:59 UTC