Re: Showing the Semantic Web

> e web, this is a ridiculous assumption. It makes every  reasoner 
> gullible.
>
> It would be better if every single assertion was implicitly reified  
> by its containing URI, with the *option* of attaching even more  
> metadata to the statement-about-a-statement (ie, which individual or  
> entity in particular is making these assertions, when they were made,  
> etc). Then the reasoner would be able to parse many identical  
> assertions, and rate their validity based on any number of factors.  
> For instance,  you could ask such a reasoner (although probably not  
> in English): "do French people believe that Jerry Lewis is funny?"  
> Even with no such attributes attached to a statement, the results of  
> any query you make could be qualified based on their popularity.
>
> Or maybe I'm way off... Anyone?
>
> - ben syverson
> likn
>
Not sure if it can help but with the minimum self contained graph theory 
[1] and the implementing "RDF Context Tools" [2] you can attach context 
statements in a relatively efficent way (much more than reifying each 
triple). Such context stays in the same graph so there is no need of 
special container spaces for statements, metastatements etc.  The theory 
(and practice) works very nice in an evironment where people xchange 
what they know "about" given resource, bit by bit, passing on what they 
learnt from others. In this situation it is fundamental that the 
knowledge of who created the original info (e.g. a digital signature) 
stays attached to the info while it gets shipped and inserted in new 
repositories. This is what happens in the DBin personal semantic 
client/P2P paradigm we're working on (see www.dbin.org).

Please note that this sort of handling (Swapping what users know "about" 
things) is fine if you treat RDF, but it isnt so if you treat RDFS or 
OWL statements (e.g. want to directly exchange statements saying that X 
is a subclass of Y etc). Given how critical it could be to insert a 
wrong ontological statements into a reasoner, ontologies should probably 
be treated in a different ways (as given by some community "leader") or 
left for the user to manually "accept" from "strangers" if needed.
Giovanni

[1] Signing Individual Fragments of an RDF Graph, www2005 poster track 
http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p1020.pdf
[2] http://www.dbin.org/RDFContextTools.php

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2006 22:44:15 UTC