RE: My task from last week: Semantic free identifiers

All I meant is that you can index the labels to do your URI substitution in writing code (axioms/queries) in some program (exact matching here). Perfectly reasonable for a selected set of orthogonal ontologies. Search/partial matches would obviously need to match other requirements.

m.

From: public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org [mailto:public-semweb-lifesci-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Graham Matthews
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2011 1:30 PM
To: public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org
Subject: RE: My task from last week: Semantic free identifiers


IMHO, if you're still coding the content of an information system by hand, then you're going to introduce errors. A database curator should never assign their own identifier - this is internal to the technology and the information system. If you're a programmer, you should query the resource (ontology) for the identifiers based on the labels.  Be more sophisticated. Do it right. Build useable APIs/UIs for people.



Best,



m.
Looking up URIs by their labels is a recipe for serious problems since several URIs may have the same label (e.g. "in" as a label can apply to a lot of relations -- locatedIn, locatedOn, inside, some temporal relations, etc).

If you look at URIs by label you are looking up semantics by it's syntax. We have been down that path before with other formalisms and it's proven itself to be generally a terrible idea (and not just in computer science).

Finally I think this whole debate is back-to-front. People seem to be worried about making SPARQL queries more neutral. Who cares about readability of SPARQL queries? No-one is going to be writing SPARQL queries. The tools should allow us to work at much higher levels of abstraction than queries, and then the tool spits out the write SPARQL query. The humans never see it. And those who do look at it will be experts and so can sort out the issues themselves.

graham
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