Re: Our approach to unasserted assertions is ambiguous and lossy [ was: Re: streamlining the baseline]

On Jun 20, 2024, at 3:05 AM, Thomas Lörtsch <tl@rat.io> wrote:
> 
> [Changing the subject line to bring more attention to this issue] 
> 
> Imagine a graph which contains the following triples:
> 
>    << :Moon :madeOf :Cheese >> a :Theory ;
>                                :mentionedBy :Alice .
> 
> Alice doesn’t endorse that statement, but she is polite and calls it a 'theory’ nonetheless. Then another pair of triples is added to the graph, maybe because new facts come in, maybe because a merge is performed between multiple graphs concerned with that topic. That new pair of triples is:
> 
>    :Moon :madeOf :Cheese .
>    << :Moon :madeOf :Cheese >> :mentionedBy :Bob .
> 
> (it seems like Bob endorses that theory). The addition results in the following graph:
> 
>    :Moon :madeOf :Cheese .
>    << :Moon :madeOf :Cheese >> a :Theory ;
>                                :mentionedBy :Alice .
>    << :Moon :madeOf :Cheese >> :mentionedBy :Bob .
> 
> Here it is not clear anymore who asserted what, or who just commented on a statement without asserting (and endorsing) it. If one doesn’t know the complete change history of the graph one wouldn’t even know if both, or none of them, asserted and endorsed that statement ':Moon :madeOf :Cheese .' (it could have been there before any annotating satetements).

This is also a problem for LPG interop. It is important to know whether each annotation is being made about asserted statements or unasserted statements, as that would impact how (or if) those annotations are visible to an LPG query, and also how many edges you end up seeing (in the above case, depending on the approach, I think you could end up with 1, 2, or 3 “madeOf” edges in an LPG view of this data).

.greg

Received on Thursday, 20 June 2024 15:43:55 UTC