- From: Peter Ansell <ansell.peter@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:45:22 +1000
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, Jim McCusker <mccusj@rpi.edu>, Andrea Splendiani <andrea.splendiani@deri.org>, David Booth <david@dbooth.org>, Jeremy J Carroll <jjc@syapse.com>, Umutcan ŞİMŞEK <s.umutcan@gmail.com>, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, w3c semweb HCLS <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
On 18 March 2013 12:50, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote: > > On Mar 17, 2013, at 6:22 PM, Peter Ansell wrote: > >> On 18 March 2013 09:14, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Can someone *please* tell me what a context is?? >>> >>> My null hypothesis is that when someone says "context" they either don't >>> know what they are talking about, or are too lazy to say. Both these cases >>> are deadly for clear communication on the web. >>> >> >> One interpretation may be RDF Graphs, see RDF-1.1 drafts for the >> current definition of that [1]. > > Nope, RDF graphs do not, according to the current (and likely future) specs, define contexts (in any useful sense), because they cannot change the interpretations of IRIs. The WebArch document (rather hopefully) assigns complete responsibility for assigning the intended interpretation of an IRI to the owner (based on the IRI scheme). This is not how names are traditionally defined and refined in science, so there is a fundamental clash between the two philosophies there. Even if one would theoretically agree that the broad intended meaning for an IRI is not changing, there are very simple ways to implement context-sensitive queries using different RDF graphs. Different RDF Graphs can be used for the same query to contrast the differences across either time or some other dimension where differences in the statements related to an IRI changes the exact interpretation of the IRI. Personally I use owl:versionIRI for the version (read context) identification but there are certainly other ways to identify context and simply map the context to RDF Graphs. This makes for a simple to manage system that matches my groups intended semantics when a scientist updates the dataset. Ie, the version changes and one may choose to use a previous version (where the version is identified as an IRI which maps directly to an RDF Graph) if it is necessary, but IRIs are consistent across most updates to make the process manageable. Cheers, Peter
Received on Monday, 18 March 2013 03:45:49 UTC