Re: Schema.org in RDF ...

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 7:50 AM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> On Sun, 2011-06-12 at 05:51 -0400, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>> >> David, as you know, it is trivial to distinguish in representation the
>> >> difference between an information object and a person.
>> >
>> > Correct.  And that distinction is important to some apps and not to
>> > others.
>>
>> I am glad we agree. We also agree that what is important is not
>> germane to the technical question of whether ambiguity is necessary, I
>> hope.
>
> I don't know what you mean by that.  It is trivial to say that
> foaf:Person owl:disjointWith foaf:Document or some such thing, which is
> what I thought you meant in your comment above.

Very good, that will help.

>  And it is trivial for *some* people to arrange for their URIs to return 303 redirects.

I have not mentioned 303 or web behavior here at all, nor do I think
it relevant to this discussion. You are making a claim about the
necessity of ambiguity *as a fundamental principle*. While I think
there were some interesting things that Pat had to say about this
issue, I am claiming that raising that issue in this context is simply
wrong and misleading.

<snip more irrelevant commentary>

> You are missing the point.  Sure, any *specific* ambiguity can be
> avoided.  For *any* particular ambiguity it is possible to define our
> classes in a way to avoid that *particular* kind of ambiguity.  But if
> you focus only on fixing each particular ambiguity you'll miss the
> forest for the trees.

You will need to more than simply assert this in order for me to be
convinced. For instance you would need to prove to me (and the other
readers) that disambiguating some elements *introduces* ambiguity
elsewhere. Please demonstrate this.

> It is *fallacious* to think that the ambiguity problem in general can be
> solved by getting people to "fix" their data to be unambiguous

Once again this is off the point. There is some specific ambiguity
that is in question here. We have agreed that there is no principle
that says *these* ambiguities can not be avoided.

It is an entirely different issue to discuss the cost of doing this. I
have yet to comment on that in our discussion because I wish to get
the fallacious arguments you make out of the picture first, since they
confuse the issue.

I am *very* interested in the cost/benefit issues. Let's talk about
that without this nonsense that the problem isn't possible to fix *in
principle*.

<snip irrelevant http-range14 issues>

> I do not think it is at all misleading to point out the larger issue
> that underlies this specific case.  On the contrary, I think it would be
> misleading to ignore it.

It is promulgating FUD.

-Alan

Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2011 04:18:43 UTC