- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:17:49 -0400
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, Jason Borro <jason@openguid.net>
On Sat, 2011-06-18 at 23:05 -0500, 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. I don't think that analogy holds. I don't think this is any sort of meta-language confusion. I agree that (for many applications) documents are more semantically distant from dogs than female dogs are from male dogs, but I see that as merely a difference of degree -- and one that is application dependent -- and not of kind. Semantically, they are all just relations, and some of these relations are important to some applications, and others to others: :x ex:isPrimarySubjectOf :d . :y ex:isSecondarySubjectOf :d . :m ex:isOppositeSexOf :f . To my mind, those all look pretty similar in nature. > Maybe this does not break Web architecture, but it certainly breaks > **semantic** architecture. I don't think that's true. But I think my comments will get a bit deeper into semantic web architectural issues than will interest most LOD readers, so I've moved my explanation to the AWWSW list instead: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-awwsw/2011Jun/0006.html [ . . . ] > So far, http-range-14 is the only viable suggestion I have seen for > how to do this. If anyone has a better one, let us discuss it. But > just blandly assuming that it will all come out in the wash is a bad > idea. It won't. I agree with both of these sentiments though. -- 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, 21 June 2011 21:18:23 UTC