Re: A few questions about grounding entities

Hi Leon,

On 7 Apr 2014, at 10:45, Leon Derczynski <leon@dcs.shef.ac.uk> wrote:
> 1. What should be found when one visits a grounding URI? Is there some special content negotiation in this scenario, e.g. a default Content-Type or an expected range of supported Accept-Encoding values?

A good resource for this question is the following document, which I co-authored:
http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

It shows its age a bit, but presents one workable view on the issue.

> 3. When evaluating accuracy of grounding, it is important to recognise different URIs that are the same entity. These occur a lot already. rdf:sameAs seems too fuzzy, and owl:exactMatch isn't used in a lot of cases. How can such URIs be reliably identified as anchors to the same entity?

I presume you mean owl:sameAs and skos:exactMatch? That’s the most frequently used options.

Which one is most appropriate depends a lot on the modelling style that is used for your collection of entity/topic URIs. If your URIs identify countries and people, use sameAs. If they identify skos:Concepts (that is, entries in a knowledge organisation scheme created by an taxonomist), use exactMatch. If you’re unsure, flip a coin and don't worry too much about the choice of predicate.

(A deep examination of this issue can lead down an unproductive philosophical rat hole, where the only way out can be to accept that these are all modelling choices, and in modelling there is no right or wrong, there is only usefulness for a given purpose. The usefulness of a link in practice depends mostly on what’s at the two ends, not on the predicate in the middle.)

Best,
Richard



> 
> All the best,
> 
> 
> Leon
> 
> -- 
> Leon R A Derczynski
> Research Associate, NLP Group
> 
> Department of Computer Science
> University of Sheffield, UK
> 
> http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~leon/

Received on Monday, 7 April 2014 11:36:50 UTC