Re: geo location tutorial cut

On Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:47:10 +0200, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com>  
wrote:

> I honestly think this is one of those "how many angels on the head of a  
> pin" discussions.

No, there really is a difference. Even if you knew how many angels fitted  
on a pin, it still wouldn't make a difference. But it really does make a  
difference if you say

	<span about="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waste_Land"
               property="dc:creator">T.S. Eliot</a>

because T.S. Eliot wrote the poem called The Wasteland, and did *not*  
write that webpage about it.

> To the great unwashed out there the distinction will be lost.

I don't think so; it just needs attention. People understand that there  
are things without URIs. You, me, towns, cars, emotions.

> And introducing a new URI scheme seems a heavy weight solution for such  
> an esoteric problem.

But it isn't esoteric, and it's easy to understand once you appreciate the  
difference. I, as a person, do not have a URL. You cannot dereference any  
URL and get me. There is however a page *about* me.

The reason I proposed a new URI scheme is that I believe we will need to  
talk about things without URIs as often as things with URIs, and to save  
all that typing it would be great just to be able to say it simply.

> I sort of like your bnode abstraction because it allows the creation of  
> a decent node that I can reference throughout a document.  It is way  
> better than the fragment identifier approach I was going to take.  I  
> think I will try going that way and see where it takes me.

Yes, I started using the fragment identifier approach, but that really  
*is* esoteric (to my mind at least) especially with all those HTTP 303  
rules.

Steven

>
> Thanks!
>
> Steven Pemberton wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:53:30 +0200, Shane McCarron <shane@aptest.com>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> One question that has already been posed to me for which I do not have  
>>> a good answer:
>>>
>>> In the examples I point to the dbpedia entry for the Washington  
>>> Monument as the definitive *subject* I am describing.  There is also a  
>>> Washington Monument web page from the US Government.  Why is that not  
>>> a more appropriate subject?  I use a link to it in the examples so  
>>> there is something to "click" on.  And if that were the subject for  
>>> everything, is there a way to update the markup so that we wouldn't  
>>> have to duplicate the URI?
>>
>> As Mark pointed out, this is a question I recently raised. In short,  
>> there is a major difference between a thing and a web page about that  
>> thing.
>>
>> The dc:creator of me is my mother*, but the dc:creator of my web page  
>> is me. If you mixed me up with my web page, you would have to conclude  
>> that I was my own mother. It's as simple as that.
>>
>> I went to a talk at XTech by someone creating a search engine for RDF,  
>> and he said it was a major headache for them, since their engine was  
>> constantly concluding things like "Tim Berners-Lee" and "W3C" were the  
>> same thing.
>>
>> So the approach I am using in the tutorial I am writing is to say:
>>
>>     <link about="_:WashingtonMonument" rel="foaf:primaryTopicOf"
>>                
>> href="http://www.dbpedia.org/resource/Washington_Monument" />
>>     ...
>>     <p about="_:WashingtonMonument"
>>            property="geo:lat_long"  
>> content="38.8895563,-77.0352546">During our trip ...
>>
>> and then it doesn't matter if you use the Wikipedia page as referent,  
>> or the .gov page, or even both.
>>
>> My recent proposal to shortcut this is to define a new URI scheme:
>>
>>     <p about="pto:http://www.dbpedia.org/resource/Washington_Monument"
>>            property="geo:lat_long"  
>> content="38.8895563,-77.0352546">During our trip ...
>>
>> (where 'pto' means 'primary topic of').
>>
>> Steven
>> * In passing, I recently met the daughter of an Italian artist who'd  
>> had her mother's signature tatooed on her neck.
>>
>

Received on Monday, 30 June 2008 17:15:02 UTC