Re: struggling with ASK

On 30 November 2011 02:24, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> On 11/29/11 6:03 PM, Peter Williams wrote:
>
> Thanks folks. I think Im nearly done.
>
> Love now to see someone's (*off topic*) ideas for walking the foaf:knows
> link chain, using the Euler reasoner.
>
> Re. walking the chain via SPARQL albeit Virtuoso SPARQL specific, see:
>
> 1. http://lod.openlinksw.com/b3s/search.vsp?q=6

Nice technically! How much of this is do-able in SPARQL 1.1 without
extensions btw?

One not-exactly-technical concern: we should be careful not to
overload the meaning of 'foaf:knows'. It is by design weak, an
entry-level social link. It is not supposed to be a risky or
emotionally draining thing to decide to assert it. No "am I really
friends with this person" teen-blogger-angst. Taken in aggregate (as
we do here) a big pile of foaf:knows assertions about some party might
carry more information, but the basic idea is just that some person X
knows some person Y, in the weak sense of 'have had some reciprocated
interaction' with them. It might be read as 'asserts common humanity
of', except in practice people don't do much checking, and accepts
bots and scripts and spammers a bit too freely.

In practice as exported from various social Web sites, it means roughly

* party X has 'added' party Y in the site
* party Y has glanced quickly and the name and photo details the site
showed for X
* party Y confirms to the site that they know/accept/allow X to be
linked to them (as a 'friend' or some such increasingly meaningless
label)

the slow rise of friend lists, groups, circles etc will shake things
up a bit. But nothing yet strongly implies trust, or any careful
checking of evidence.

I do think there's something that could be done in which people more
explicitly assert that they've seen evidence supporting some binding
of real-life identity (nym'd or not) with online accounts. So for
example if skype:hs12341234 and I have a video chat, and I am
persuaded that the other party is Henry, and not under obvious duress,
and he says 'yes this is my personal skype account and nobody else
controls it', ... I'd like some idiom in RDF to log and possibly share
that information so that others might choose to partially rely on it.

I have a vague feeling that's where the foaf:knows transitivity theme
is expected to go; however the meaning of that relationship is weak
both by design and by common implementation, that I'm not sure it'll
carry the weight of expectations that are being heaped upon it.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Wednesday, 30 November 2011 10:03:02 UTC