- From: Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 12:37:48 +0200
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, David Booth <david@dbooth.org>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, Jason Borro <jason@openguid.net>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
On 19 Jun 2011, at 06:05, Pat Hayes wrote: > Really (sorry to keep raining on the parade, but) it is not as simple as this. Look, it is indeed easy to not bother distinguishing male from female dogs. One simply talks of dogs without mentioning gender, and there is a lot that can be said about dogs without getting into that second topic. But confusing web pages, or documents more generally, with the things the documents are about, now that does matter a lot more, simply because it is virtually impossible to say *anything* about documents-or-things without immediately being clear which of them - documents or things - one is talking about. And there is a good reason why this particular confusion is so destructive. Unlike the dogs-vs-bitches case, the difference between the document and its topic, the thing, is that one is ABOUT the other. This is not simply a matter of ignoring some potentially relevant information (the gender of the dog) because one is temporarily not concerned with it: it is two different ways of using the very names that are the fabric of the descriptive representations themselves. It confuses language with language use, confuses language with meta-language. It is like saying giraffe has seven letters rather than "giraffe" has seven letters. Maybe this does not break Web architecture, but it certainly breaks **semantic** architecture. It completely destroys any semantic coherence we might, in some perhaps impossibly optimistic vision of the future, manage to create within the semantic web. So yes indeed, the Web will go on happily confusing things with documents, partly because the Web really has no actual contact with things at all: it is entirely constructed from documents (in a wide sense). But the SEMANTIC Web will wither and die, or perhaps be still-born, if it cannot find some way to keep use and mention separate and coherent. The way to do this is to build applications where this thing matters. So for example in the social web we could build a slightly more evolved "like" protocol/ontology, which would be decentralised for one, but would also allow one to distinguish documents, from other parts of documents and things. So one could then say that one wishes to bring people's attention to a well written article on a rape, rather than having to "like" the rape. Or that one wishes to bring people's attention to the content of an article without having to "like" the style the article is written in. If such applications take hold, and there is a way the logic of using these applications is made to work where these distinctions become useful and visible to the end user, then there will be millions of vocal supporters of this distinction - which we know exists, which programmers know exists, which pretty much everyone knows exists, but which people new to the semweb web, like the early questioners of the viability of the "mouse" and the endless debates about that animal, will question because they can't feel in their bones the reality of this thing. > So far, http-range-14 is the only viable suggestion I have seen for how to do this. Well hash uris are of course a lot easier to understand. http-range-14 is clearly a solution which is good to know about but that will have an adoption problem. > If anyone has a better one, let us discuss it. I am of the view that this has been discussed to death, and that any mailing list that discusses this is short of real things to do. One could argue much more fruitfully on DocumentObject ontologies, and it would be interesting to see where that leads one. > But just blandly assuming that it will all come out in the wash is a bad idea. It won't. Well these are logical necessities you are speaking of. So it will come out in the wash. Just like 2+2=4, those who wish to ignore it will loose out in a number of transactions. So the fun thing is that we can find completely coherent ontologies that don't brake the semweb and that would allow Richard Cyganiak to write > <http://richard.cyganiak.de/> a foaf:Document; > dofoaf:name "Richard Cyganiak"; > dc:title: "Richard Cyganiak's homepage"; > dofoaf:knows <http://bblfish.net/> . It looks like here that the document has been confused with the object, but in fact the relations are designed so that they indirectly refer to something else. Now it is not clear that this is easier or less confusing to write than pure foaf. But it does make it look like what Danny wants to have is happening, namely that the document refers to the thing too - assuming a document only refers to one thing. But that is already the main problem. Even an image never refers to one thing only. Take a simple image of the eiffel tower: there can be cars in it, there can be birds, mice, rats (ratatouille), and many other creatures jumping around on people's heads. The higher the resolution the more things that picture can be said to refer to. So to know which is the primary topic of an image one would nearly need to add a new relation to express that. Henry > > Pat > > On Jun 18, 2011, at 1:51 PM, Danny Ayers wrote: > >> On 17 June 2011 02:46, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote: >> >>> I agree with TimBL that it is *good* to distinguish between web pages >>> and dogs -- and we should encourage folks to do so -- because doing so >>> *does* help applications that need this distinction. But the failure to >>> make this distinction does *not* break the web architecture any more >>> than a failure to distinguish between male dogs and female dogs. >> >> Thanks David, a nice summary of the most important point IMHO. >> >> Ok, I've been trying to rationalize the case where there is a failure >> to make the distinction, but that's very much secondary to the fact >> that nothing really gets broken. >> >> Cheers, >> Danny. >> >> http://danny.ayers.name >> >> > > ------------------------------------------------------------ > IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 > 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office > Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax > FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile > phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes > > > > > > Social Web Architect http://bblfish.net/
Received on Sunday, 19 June 2011 10:38:30 UTC