Re: How will the semantic web emerge

Oh, you are worried about typing because it may lead you to have to  
make decisions about which authority to trust. That is a problem of  
database consistency not of typing. If two people say something  
different about someone, such as

:p rdf:type x:thief.

and another says

:p rdf:type x:honest.

You will need to decide what you should add to your database. And  
there will always be many ways you can render your database  
consistent. You can either reject one or the other proposals, or  
reject the proposal that a man cannot be both honest and a thief.

This is not a problem with typing. Its a problem about which  
statements you decide to accept and how you decide to keep your  
database consistent. The semantic web leaves that open for you to  
decide. You will have this problem by the way whether you have typing  
or not. As long as you have statements that can be contradictory -  
and unless you have those you won't be able to say anything  
interesting - this problem will appear.


Henry

On 20 Dec 2005, at 22:05, Joshua Allen wrote:
>> More generally, it depends on your general approach to describing
> things
>> on the Web.  You can use RDF with a kind of object-oriented design
>
> Frank,
>
> Your entire message described the debate precisely -- I think of it as
> O-O versus Lisp.  I think that the O-O style (strongly typed) will  
> never
> be the mainstream.  For semweb to be as commonplace as WWW, we need  
> bare
> naked triples, like lisp.  Just as I can hyperlink to a page, whether
> that page is valid, alive, or ever existed; I must be able to read a
> predicate, whether that resource is properly typed or not.
>

Received on Tuesday, 20 December 2005 21:35:33 UTC