Re: Owning URIs (Was: Yet Another LOD cloud browser)

Sherman Monroe wrote: 
>
>     To be more specific, these days a news reporter can say
>     "foobar.com <http://foobar.com>" on TV and expect that to mean
>     something to most of the audience. That's a marvel. Something more
>     than just the string "foobar.com <http://foobar.com>" is
>     transfered. It's the expectation that if anyone in the audience
>     were to type "foobar.com <http://foobar.com>" into any web
>     browser, then they would be seeing information served by the
>     authority associated with some topic or entity called "foobar" as
>     socially defined. And 99% of the audience would be seeing the same
>     information. What's the equivalent or analogous of that on the SW?
>
>
> I just want to make sure the analogies are aligned properly and are 
> salient. The WWW contains only nouns (no sentences). If I have an 
> interest or service I want to share with others, then I post a webpage 
> and /share its URL/ with you. In the SW, things are centered around 
> the crowd, if I have something to say about the an interest, service, 
> place, person, etc, then I /reference its URL/ in my statements. So 
> the SW contains sentences that can be browsed. Type the URL in the WWW 
> browser, you get /the thing /being shared. Type the URI in the SW 
> browser, you get the /things people say about the thing/.
I didn't quite express myself clearly. If you were to take the previous 
sentence ("I didn't quite express myself clearly"), and encode it in 
RDF, what would you get? It certainly is something that I said about 
"the thing", the thing being vaguely what I tried to explain before (how 
do you mint a URI for that?). The point is that using RDF or whatever 
other non-natural language structured data representation, you cannot 
practically represent "the things people say about the thing" in the 
majority of real-life cases. You can only express a very tiny subset of 
what can be said in natural language. This affects how people 
conceptualize and use this medium. If I hear a URI on TV, would I be 
motivated enough to type it into some browser when what I get back looks 
like an engineering spec sheet, but worse--with different rows from 
different sources, forcing me to derive the big picture myself,
    urn:sdajfdadjfai324829083742983:sherman_monroe
       name: Sherman Monroe (according to foo.com)
       age: __ (according to bar.com)
       age: ___ (according to bar2.com)
       nationality: __ (according to baz.com)
       ...
rather than, say, a natural language essay that conveys a coherent 
opinion, or a funny video?

David

Received on Tuesday, 19 May 2009 16:45:11 UTC