Re: Decommissioning a linked data site

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Bradley Allen <bradley.p.allen@gmail.com> wrote:
> Leigh- This is great. The question that comes up for me out of what you've
> written for unpublishing brings me back to Antoine's question: is it
> appropriate to use a relation other than owl:sameAs that more specific to
> the domain of the affected datasets being mapped, or is the nature of
> unpublishing such that one would, as opposed to my reasoning earlier, be as
> broad as possible in asserting equivalence, and use owlsameAs in every such
> case?

Really interesting question, and this might prompt me to revise the pattern :)

So, generally, I advocate using the appropriate equivalence relation
that relates to a specific domain. As I wrote in [1] its best to use
the most appropriate equivalence link, as they have varying semantics.

But for the unpublishing use case I think I'd personally lean towards
*always* using owl:sameAs at least in the case where we are returning
a 301 status code. I've previously come to the conclusion [2] that a
301 implies a sameAs statement. The intent seems very similar to a
sameAs. Rewriting local links to use a new location is very similar to
smushing descriptions in an RDF dataset such that statements only
relate to the new URI.

However I can see arguments to the effect that the new authority might
have a slightly different definition of a resource than the original
publisher, such that an owl:sameAs might be inappropriate. That's why
I left the advice in the pattern slightly open ended: I think it may
need to be evaluated on a case by case basis, but owl:sameAs seems
like a good workable default to me.

Cheers,

L.

[1]. http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/equivalence-links.html
[2]. http://www.ldodds.com/blog/2007/03/the-semantics-of-301-moved-permanently/

Received on Friday, 1 June 2012 14:46:24 UTC