Re: When does a document acquire (web) semantics?

On 2/2/10 8:25 AM, "John Madden" <john.madden@duke.edu> wrote:
> This makes it rather difficult to use RDF in clinical care. With English
> language documents, we reject those that are not signed and original (or
> faithful copies of the signed original) for purposes of clinical care. But in
> the SW world, there is no special status. You can't sign it. You can't
> guarantee that your triples will stick together, or be picked apart.

There is no formal way to sign it, but you can get a trusted copy of the
original if the author provides a faithful representation in it in RDF
(which is what GRDDL and other similar mechanisms - RDFa, etc. - are all
about).  This does carry some authority about how well the statements
represent the information in the original artifact.  In addition, the
concrete syntax can be signed digitally (same as any other file), authorship
can be asserted in the content (Clinician A created the set of RDF triples
B) in addition to other provenance such as when it was created which
structured data source it was transcribed from.

> You can't even expect to know where a particular triple came from (who was the
> original assertor of the triple).

See above.

----------------------
Chime (chee-meh) Ogbuji (oh-bu-gee)
Heart and Vascular Institute (Clinical Investigations)
Architect / Informatician
Cleveland Clinic (ogbujic@ccf.org)
Ph.D. Student Case Western Reserve University
(chimezie.thomas-ogbuji@case.edu)


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Received on Tuesday, 2 February 2010 14:38:21 UTC