- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:51:58 -0400
- To: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
- Cc: public-lod@w3.org, Christopher Gutteridge <cjg@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
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