Re: SemWeb Non-Starter -- Distributed URI Discovery

On Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:04:28 +1000, Patrick Stickler  
<patrick.stickler@nokia.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Apr 4, 2005, at 11:31, ext Jeremy Carroll wrote:
>
>> Al Miles wrote:
>>>> Second, there is a more general discovery requirement which can be  
>>>> loosely phrased as, 'I want to find out what x said about y,' or,  
>>>> 'who said what about what?'  I have no ideas for how to solve that.
>
> Hmmm...  I'm trying to grok how I might best rephrase the
> question in a more practical form to avoid philosophical
> nuances.
>
> Perhaps "what is the core, authoritative body of knowledge provided by
> the owner of this URI which describes the resource identified by the  
> URI?"
>
>> The right question is Alistair's.
>
> My point was that there is no single "right question". There are several.
>
> *A* right question is certainly Alistair's.
>
> *Another* right question is the one I pose above (hopefully better
> worded than previously).

Actually Alistair poses two questions, one of wich strikes me as to  
general to be one of the "most right" ones :-). I think that Patrick's  
question is also somewhat general - what does the author of X have to say  
about X is a pretty unconstrained question. It strikes me as something  
that is often interesting, but is the kind of question I would avoid  
asking if I were trying to do any specific work.

>> A google like system seems to be a plausible answer, we just need an  
>> economic model for it.
>
> A google like system is certainly a part of the answer, but we
> also need access to authoritative descriptions of resources in
> an analogous manner to how we now have access to authoritative
> representations.

I'm not sure this is true, if we have a google-like system that can read  
RDF. After all, RDF should be capable of defining various "authority"  
relations, so you just describe the kind of authorative that you mean as  
part of your query, no?

> One reason why the web is a success is because it is distributed,
> not centralized. One does not have to be aware of third party
> centralized repositories of representations in order to ask for
> one, given a particular URI. One just asks the web authority of
> the URI. Yes, centralized repositories (or indexes) of representations
> such as google are tremendous tools, but they simply augment the
> fundamental architecture of the web.
>
> GET is to MGET as GOOGLE is to SPARQL
>
> Given a particular URI, and no further knowledge, one could
> ideally obtain an authoritative description of the resource
> identified by that URI from the web authority of the URI.

Yep. But the idea that any collection of descriptions selected by whoever  
sets up a webserver is intrinsically more interestng than a speciic query  
over descriptions that may have cme from anywhere strikes me as pretty  
flawed. If I could rely on that data to answer a handful of chosen  
questions then I can see it being more useful, and if I could know in  
advance when it would be useless that would be even better.

> But a centralized solution to knowledge discovery cannot be
> the foundational or primary solution if we are to see
> global, ubiquitous scalability achieved for the SW in the
> same manner as has been achieved for the web.

Right. Of course a lot depends on what you mean by "a centralised  
solution"...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Sunday, 10 April 2005 08:16:54 UTC