- From: Jeremy Carroll <jjc@hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Thu, 15 May 2008 18:13:30 +0100
- To: Michael F Uschold <uschold@gmail.com>
- CC: Frederick Giasson <fred@fgiasson.com>, Yves Raimond <yves.raimond@gmail.com>, Aldo Gangemi <aldo.gangemi@cnr.it>, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, Sören Auer <auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>, Semantic Web Interest Group <semantic-web@w3.org>, Chris Bizer <chris@bizer.de>, Frank van Harmelen <Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl>, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>, "Fabian M. Suchanek" <f.m.suchanek@gmail.com>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@csail.mit.edu>, Jim Hendler <hendler@cs.rpi.edu>, Mark Greaves <markg@vulcan.com>, georgi.kobilarov@gmx.de, Jens Lehmann <lehmann@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>, Michael Bergman <mike@mkbergman.com>, Conor Shankey <cshankey@reinvent.com>, Kira Oujonkova <koujonkova@reinvent.com>
My take on the strength of owl:sameAs issue is that it depends on what the application is trying to do. For some applications, a fairly loose use of owl:sameAs will be really helpful, like between: [[ For example, http://dbtune.org/jamendo/artist/5 and http://zitgist.com/music/artist/0781a3f3-645c-45d1-a84f-76b4e4decf6d dentify the same artist. One of them in the Jamendo database, and one of them in Musicbrainz. ]] or, what I get the impression to be looser, between [[ Spain the political entity is the same as Spain the geopolicial region. ]] or [[ a city as from Cyc to a wikipedia article of that city ]] owl:sameAs, like any other predicate is a point of view, and we can choose to make interpretations of the world in which even quite loose notions of identity hold. If we arrange that owl:sameAs triples of varying strengths are in different graphs, then, different applications can load up with the strength of sameAs that is appropriate to their needs, their world view, their interpretation of the world. [I am deliberately trying to fudge on whether I mean 'interpretation' in a formal or an informal sense] This sense of their being a multiplicity of world views originated in the same collection of named graphs (in the limit, the whole of the Semantic Web), is articulated in the named graphs papers in terms of the application choosing which graphs to trust, where trust is about fitness for purpose, rather than absolute truth. So, on the example of: [[ a city as from Cyc to a wikipedia article of that city ]] a list of all such correspondences, between Cyc and wikipedia, might be a great thing to have in a mash-up, and by all means use owl:sameAs. But keep that list in a separate graph from other data, and I can load it for a mash-up, and not for a different application in which such loose thinking is not appropriate. Also, the more metadata we provide about the metadata we provide, the easier it will be for applications to make such choices, so being able to label a graph of somewhat dodgy equivalences, as a graph of somewhat dodgy equivalences, in a vocabulary that had sufficent deployment, would help. Jeremy
Received on Thursday, 15 May 2008 17:16:53 UTC