- From: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:27:03 +0100
- To: "semantic-web at W3C" <semantic-web@w3c.org>
The other day, in conversation with Richard Cyganiak (recorded at [1]), I paraphrased something timbl had mentioned (recorded at [2]) : when expressing data as RDF on the Web, it's possible to make a rough guess at how the information should appear, and over time incrementally/iteratively improve its alignment with the rest of the world. I was upbeat on this (and my paraphrasing probably lost a lot of timbl's intent) because personally when doing things with RDF I find it hugely advantageous over a traditional SQL RDMS approach simply because you can be more agile - not getting your schema right first time isn't an obstacle to development. But the stuff I play with (which I do usually put on the web somewhere) isn't likely to develop a forward chain of dependencies. But Richard pointed out (no doubt badly paraphrasing again) that the making of statements when published on the Web brought with it a level of commitment. I don't think he used these words, but perhaps a kind of responsibility. The example he gave of where problems can arise was DBpedia - the modelling, use of terms, is revised every couple of months or so. Anyone who built an app based on last months vocab might find the app broken on next month's revision. I think Richard had properties particularly in mind - though even when Cool URIs are maintained, might not changes around connections to individuals still be problematic? So I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how to accomodate rapid development (or at least being flexible over time) without repeatedly breaking consuming applications. How deep does our modelling have to go to avoid this kind of problem? Can the versioning bits of OWL make a significant difference? Or to turn it around, as a consumer of Semantic Web data, how do you avoid breakage due to changes upstream? Should we be prepared to retract/replace whole named graphs containing ontologies, do we need to keep provenance for *everything*? I suspect related - if we have a locally closed world, where do we put the boundaries? Cheers, Danny. [1] http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/03/a_chat_with_richard_cyganiak.php [2] http://blogs.zdnet.com/semantic-web/?p=105 -- http://dannyayers.com ~ http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/this_weeks_semantic_web/
Received on Friday, 14 March 2008 22:27:38 UTC