- From: Christopher Brewster <C.Brewster@dcs.shef.ac.uk>
- Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2007 23:10:35 +0200
- To: "Chris Bizer" <chris@bizer.de>
- Cc: SW-forum Web <semantic-web@w3.org>, Linking Open Data <linking-open-data@simile.mit.edu>, www-tag@w3.org
> On 22 Jul 2007, at 22:29, Chris Bizer wrote: > > > Hi Alan, > >> Thanks for the more detailed information. While I agree with the >> need to be able to have a mechanism for making statements about >> URIs that one doesn't mint, such as http://www.w3.org/People/ >> Berners-Lee/ card#i, what I don't follow in your discussion is >> why such additional statements need to be attached to an alias >> (in the sameAs sense) of the original URI. It would seem worth >> justifying this in the light of the associated costs of such aliases >> >> - The lower likelihood of successful "joins" in queries if a) Not >> all "sameAs"s are available to an agent or b) The agent's reasoner >> isn't capable of correctly handling sameAs >> - The uncertain semantics of sameAs when taken out of the context >> of the OWL specification. >> >> For instance, why not have e.g. dbpedia only name *resources* >> which are understood as "community statements about" some >> subject, in which statements about tbl would use his designated >> name for himself? >> > > Yes, in a perfect world you are right, but unfortunately, we are > not living in a perfect world. > > DBpedia is a good example for this. We are assigning URIs to > 1,600,000 resources and we don't have a clue which URIs we assign > to some town, molecules, flowers or planets. We even don't know if > we assign URIs to flowers at all, before we search within our > dataset for flowers. > > We do this because we want to create a useful open dataset in the > short term. If we would wait until there is community agreement in > each domain that DBpedia covers about a naming schema or wait until > each of the described resources has assigned a URI to itself, we > won't get anywhere. If there would be community agreement about > naming schemata (which there is not and I also do not expect such > agreement to evolve in the mid-future), the next problem would be > to bring some complicated infrastructure into place that allows > applications like DBpedia to find out that http://www.w3.org/People/ > Berners-Lee/card#i is only URI that should be used to refer to Tim > (think about stuff like URI SPAM and all the trust mechanism such > an infrastructure would need). > > So, I think that the approach of assuming that single URIs for > identifying real-world resources will evolve does not scale for > practical reasons. > > Note that this idea (of naming everything in the domain, or even in the world) so as to allow perfect communication (in our terms to allow data to be linked and for the Semantic Web to work fully) has a long history of failed attempts going back at least to the 16th century and the "philosophical language" or "universal language" movement. The prime exponent of this in the English language was Bishop John Wilkins who wrote “An essay towards a real character and philosophical language” (1668) which attempted to enumerate all of human knowledge at the time. Each concept was given a unique numerical heading. In order to achieve the necessary consensus Wilkins was a key initiator in the creation of the Royal Society to whom he entrusted the continuation of his work. They never did carry it further .... (Other great exponents of such ideas in the 16th and 17th centuries were Giordano Bruno, Gottfried Leibniz and the Czech educationalist Comenius) Thus on historical grounds I would argue that Chris Bizer's approach. Christopher
Received on Sunday, 22 July 2007 21:10:33 UTC