Re: The RDF Approach to Indicating Language-In-Use

>(Lots of good points; I understand your skepticism.)
>
>Peter:
>>  I would instead label Bijan's approach as the ``Do what you can'' approach.
>>  Applications that only understand RDF would process documents that looked
>>  like RDF as RDF.  Applications that can understand OWL (DL) would process
>>  documents that look like OWL (DL) as OWL.  More sophisticated applications
>>  could use whatever information is available to make the determination,
>>  including any standards that emerge.  This appears to scale very well.
>
>How does it handle the case of evil-OWL?  Or someone using dc:author
>as a synonym for rdf:type?  Maybe those aren't very real, but how
>about this: There's been a lot of confusion over whether the range of
>dc:author is/should be Author (a person) or AuthorsName (a Literal
>string).  If the powers-that-be in Dublin Core came down on one side
>or the other of this issue, what levers would they be able to use in
>moving the world to their chosen approach?
>
>Let's assume for simplicity that this is for a new version of the
>vocabulary, with a new namespace.
>
>Some options:
>
>    1.  Documentation on their website, not at the namespace address
>    2.  Documentation on their website, at the namespace address
>    3.  OWL on their website, not at the namespace address
>    4.  OWL on their website, at the namespace address
>    5.  Advertising, including ads in appropriate trade magazines, and
>        encouraging word-of-mouth
>    6.  Search for invalid instance data and talk to the authors
>    7.  Target the tool makers, making sure they consider the
>        wrong approach in error (essentially hard coding the ontology)
>    8.  Target the laws and contracts around the world which currently
>        specify use of Dublin Core; make sure they refer to #1/#2
>    9.  Target the laws and contracts around the world which currently
>        specify use of Dublin Core; make sure they refer to #3/#4
>
>Which of those seem good to you?   What else could they do?

None of these seem incommensurate, so they could do them all if they 
felt it was necessary or useful.  It might be a good idea to take 
down their old URL and put a warning-redirect there to the new one. 
All the same options seem to be available to people using HTML to put 
up a website which is widely referred to, and who then wish to make a 
change, and feel some responsibility to let the world know about it. 
Nobody feels shafted by changes made to HTML websites, though, so 
this doesn't seem to be such a big issue there. Why are *we* making 
such an issue of it, then? If the Web had had to wait until a 
solution had been found to the Problem of Changing Website Content, 
there wouldn't be a Web. Maybe this just isn't going to be a problem, 
so we shouldn't be trying to solve it.

Pat
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Received on Thursday, 6 November 2003 12:03:37 UTC