Glenn, it's not feasible, nor enforceable, nor desirable to develop ontologies entirely with random URIs as identifiers. I am of the opinion that local names should indeed be designed with meaningful names in mind last but not least to improve the ontology engineering process. Though that said there might be exceptions such as NLP and ML where automatic tagging and ontology creation with random URIs can useful, but that's a special use case. Marco On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 3:55 PM, glenn mcdonald <glenn@furia.com> wrote: > I agree wholeheartedly that URIs should be pure identifiers, with no > embedded semantics or assumptions of readability. And I agree with Kingsley > that there's an elephant in the room. I might even agree with Kingsley about > what the elephant is. > > But to say it from my point of view: machines need to think in ids, people > need to think in names. The RDF/SPARQL "stack", such as it is, has not > internalized the implications of this duality, and thus isn't really > prepared to support both audiences properly. Almost all the canonical > examples of RDF and SPARQL avoid this issue by using toy use-cases with > semi-human-readable URIs, and/or with literals where there ought to be > nodes. If you try to do a non-trivial dataset the right way, you'll > immediately find that writing the RDF or the SPARQL by hand is basically > intractable. If you try to produce an human-intelligible user-interface to > such data, you'll find yourself clinging to rdfs:label for dear life, and > then falling, falling, falling... > > In fact, there's almost nothing more telling than the fact that rdfs:label > is rdfS! This is in some ways the most fundamental aspect of human/computer > data-interaction, and RDF itself has essentially nothing to say about it. > -- Marco Neumann KONA Make sure to join us at the Semantic Technology Conference 2011 in San Francisco and save 15% with the coupon code STMN http://www.lotico.com/evt/stc2011/
Received on Wednesday, 18 May 2011 20:28:05 UTC