RE: Help needed: *brief* online poll about blank-nodes

Thanks to everybody who has participated in the poll so far. 

We would again prefer people who have not answered the poll (but who
intend to) to please fill it in *before* reading on.

	Link to Poll: http://db.ing.puc.cl/amallea/blank-nodes-poll

Thanks!

...

David, Jonathan,

We thank you for your feedback, but we explicitly requested that the
email was not to be replied to on-list: 

	"""to avoid influencing responses, we would strongly prefer if
this email is not replied to on-list. If you want to leave feedback,
please do so in the space provided in the poll, or reply directly to
Alejandro (CC'ed on this mail) and Aidan"."""

This was a simple request. 

Of course, it's a public mailing list, and you're free to respond if you
feel the need. Again however, we would *strongly prefer* if feedback is
given in the space provided or emailed directly to us off-list.

We are now in a difficult position. Since the concerns have been made
on-list, we now feel that we need to address them, in kind, on-list:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Rees [mailto:jar@creativecommons.org]
> Sent: 18 June 2011 02:59
>
> Your set of answers for question 1 does not include the one specified
> by RDF semantics.
> 
> Namely, that John has a telephone number (which we may or may not
know).
> 
> So, if one's wishes and intent are to follow the recommendation (whose
> purpose, of course, is to enable mutual intelligibility), there is no
> way to answer.
>

@Jonathan, you are of course correct in terms of how blank-nodes should
be interpreted according to RDF Semantics. But, that's explicitly what
the poll is *not* asking about. At the top of the poll (and in the
original email), we state:
	
	"""Note that the poll is trying to determine what you intend
when you publish blank nodes. It is not a quiz on RDF Semantics. There
is no correct answer."""

Your proposed option:

	"John has a telephone number (which we may or may not know)"

is, of course, formally correct in terms of *interpretation* when
consuming the data, but is not meaningful as an *intent* when
publishing. In reality, publishers do not say to themselves "I may or
may not know the value of X, therefore I shall publish this as a
blank-node".

Purely in terms of concrete publishing *intent*, we firmly believe that
for our question, our option:

	"John has a telephone number, but we don't know the number."

makes more sense, speaking directly to the question we want answered.
You may or may not agree, but please try to see this from our point of
view.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Booth [mailto:david@dbooth.org]
> Sent: 18 June 2011 03:46
>
> And, quite annoyingly: (a) the server refuses to show the poll again
if
> it thinks you have already submitted an answer; and (b) it seems to
> think that everyone in the same local area network is the same person!
> 
> David

@David, apologies. The poll is based on Drupal and filters multiple
responses based on IP addresses. We'll look into making the poll
viewable to people who have already responded (thanks for doing so). As
for the LAN issue, we're not sure if we can do anything there.

Cheers,
Aidan and Alejandro

[1] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/d/donaldrums148142.html

Received on Saturday, 18 June 2011 18:57:14 UTC