Re: Comments on "Survey of RDF/Topic Maps"

* Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com> [2005-04-01 10:55+0200]
> Steve
> 
> > Interested in further discussion of your point about the TMRM and the
> > "(Semantic) Web."  Do you see the Web as being co-extensive with the
> > range of possible subjects?  Since we all use the Web daily, it looks
> > fairly flexible to us, but that is not really the same as being able
> > to represent all subjects as seen by any author.
> 
> Depend on what one means by "represent". Some could think that a Semantic
> Web implicit assumption is that *any* possible subject of conversation will
> eventually be formally represented and uniquely identified by one (or more)
> URIs providing both machine-usable subject identifiers, and hopefully
> human-readable subject indicators.

FWIW I don't believe W3C's SW design, or the people behind it, ever
assume that. If that idea is there, it's a minority opinion...

Dan

> IMO this is plainly impossible to achieve. Most subjects will keep being
> spoken about on the Web and other information environments (publications,
> data bases, media ...) without being formally represented and uniquely
> identified by URIs. But various applications, using pragmatic identification
> rules and algorithms, will be able to gather clusters of information, so to
> speak, somehow being "about the same subject" without formal identification
> or representation of this subject. Those clusters might be very transient.
> Think about the top story on Google News today, under the heading "Pope
> Suffered Heart Failure, Condition Very Serious".
> Can one imagine that the subject of this top story is identified by the
> silly URL of the all 2,497 related ...
> 
> I don't know about persistency of such dynamic URLs, and of the information
> resources they retrieve. Note that there is no (human) author behind such
> subjects, since Google News is driven by fully automatic search algorithms,
> with no human editorial board. Would you consider Google News as a TMA,
> providing it would disclose its proprietary algorithms (which I doubt)?
> 
> My point in quoting such examples is that there are much more subjects on
> the Web only (not to speak about the rest of the information universe) than
> the Semantic Web technologies can imagine and will ever able to formally
> deal with, and that the TMRM might be a framework to deal with all those
> other subjects which are not explicitly identified by URIs, but somehow
> handled anyway by applications.
> 
> > As you point out, Bernard, this may not be the right venue for such a
> > discussion.  It depends on the scope of the definition of "best
> > practices", I guess.
> 
> That's why we should certainly port this discussion to some other venue.
> Suggestions?
> 
> 
> ****************************************************************************
> ******
> 
> Bernard Vatant
> Senior Consultant
> Knowledge Engineering
> bernard.vatant@mondeca.com
> 
> "Making Sense of Content" :  http://www.mondeca.com
> "Everything is a Subject" :  http://universimmedia.blogspot.com
> 
> ****************************************************************************
> ******

Received on Friday, 1 April 2005 09:42:49 UTC