Re: implied datasets

Hi William,

On 23 May 2011 14:01, William Waites <ww@styx.org> wrote:
> ...
> Then for each dataset that I have that uses the links to this space, I
> count them up and make a linkset pointing at this imaginary dataset.
>
> Obviously the same strategy for anywhere there exist some kind of
> standard identifiers that are not URIs in HTTP.
>
> Does this make sense?

I'm not sure that the dataset is "imaginary", but what you're doing
seems eminently sensible to me. I've been working on a little project
that I hope to release shortly that aims to facilitate this kind of
linking, especially where those non-URI identifiers, or Literal Keys
[1] are
used to build patterned URIs.

> Can we sensibly talk about and even assert the existence of a dataset
> of infinite size? (whatever "existence" means).

I think so, we can assert what kinds of things it contains and
describe it in general terms, even if we can't enumerate all of its
elements.

It may be more natural to thing of these more as services though than
datasets. i.e. a service that accepts some keys as input and returns a
set of assertions. In this case the assertions would be links to other
datasets.

> Is this an abuse of DCat/voiD?

Not in my view, I think the notion of dataset is already pretty broad.

> Are this class of datasets subsets of sameAs.org (assuming sameAs.org
> to be complete in principle?)

Subsets if they only asserted sameAs links, but I think you're
suggesting that this may be too strict. I think there's potentially a
whole set of related "predicate based services" [2] that provide
useful indexes of existing datasets, or expose additional annotations
of extra sources.

The project I've been working on facilitates not just sameAs links,
but any form of links that can be derived from shared URI patterns.
This would include topic/subject based linking. ISBN was one the use
cases I had in mind, but here are others.

Cheers,

L.

[1]. http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/literal-keys.html
[2]. http://www.ldodds.com/blog/2010/03/predicate-based-services/

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Programme Manager, Talis Platform
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Received on Monday, 23 May 2011 13:47:17 UTC