Re: Best Practice for Renaming OWL Vocabulary Elements

On 5/18/11 2:37 PM, Michael F Uschold wrote:
> Alan, I'm glad you made that suggestion.  I was also glad to see that 
> Tim-BL acknowledged that the URIs are just identifiers.  As you know, 
> noone seems to be treating them that way, nor is there good tool 
> support to make it easy to do -- probably the main reason the practice 
> persists.
>
Here is the massive elephant in the Linked Data room:
do we continue to speak in the abstract about URIs or get down to the 
nitty-gritty of dealing with its essential reality that's comprised of 
the following:

1. Using links to craft whole data representation
2. Using links to cover functionality conventionally delivered by 
de-reference (indirection) and address-of operators -- a feature native 
to all programming languages, in some capacity .

Historically, the term URI is used loosely (i.e., with HTTP URI in 
mind), and even worse, the tendency is to overlook (inadvertently)  the 
audience to which the Linked Data meme is being projected.

Micheal: your question basically highlights the problem I outline above. 
The answer is dual pronged by the inherent nature of the URI abstraction.

Here I decompose:

Q: Should HTTP URIs be meaningful? A: Assuming 'meaningful' == 
understandable by the 'user' , what does this really mean? Remember, a 
HTTP URI is endowed with Name/Address duality.

So we have a question answering a question due to the questions essence :-)

Q: Should URLs (a subClassOf URI) be meaningful? A: Assuming 
'meaningful' == 'user' discernible and as a result hackable? Then the 
answer is Yes!

Q: But aren't URLs just Identifiers? A: Yes, but they can be used in 
special ways e.g. giving Names to Entities (what Linked Data is partly 
about) as well as giving Names to Data Locations as per conventional Web 
1.0/2.0 usage patterns.

I can go on....

Cut long story short.

URIs used as Entity Names should be treated as Identifiers in the purest 
sense.
URIs as Entity Names in Linked Data Spaces have an implicit expectation 
that de-reference (indirection) and address-of are combined such that 
one Identifier is usable in the following operations:

1. de-reference (indirection)
2. address-of.

Due to HTTP ubiquity and implicit duality, an HTTP URI delivers the 
above cost-effectively, but that isn't the only solution. Via custom 
resolvers and alternative patterns e.g. .well-known/host-meta (a Web 
Linking pattern) you can have Entity Names (beyond HTTP scheme) for 
Linked Data Spaces that are discovered introspectively via linked data 
resources (the actual data containers of EAV/SPO graphs in a variety of 
formats). Basically, you discover the Name of an Entity Name via its 
Data Representation Graph which is accessed via a URL (the Name of the 
place from which you Access the Data Object).

Desperately hope this helps :-)

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2011 19:26:24 UTC