Re: relational data as a bona fide member of the SM

On 04/11/11 11:22, Alexandre Riazanov wrote:

> I don't have a problem with the OWA in general. The problem is the
> OWA is there even when you don't want it, specifically when you want
>  to be able to specify a piece of data completely and unambiguously.

IMHO, this has little to do with the OWA. By all means, go ahead and 
specify your data completely and unambiguously. Me adding additional (or 
even conflicting) data about your data somewhere on the Web does not 
suddenly invalidate _your_ data, or make it any less complete or 
unambiguous. This is a provenance/trust-issue (whose data do you take 
into account, and whose do you ignore?), not an OWA issue.

The open world assumption is about allowing anyone to say anything about 
everything, but it is not forcing you to take what everyone else says at 
face value.

>  With OWA, you cannot compute the length of a list because somebody
> else can redefine the list somewhere.

1) this is not true if you use the rdf:List construct, which 
specifically models a closed list (indeed, it was introduced into RDF 
for this very reason).

2) even if it were true, what's stopping you from just treating your 
dataset as closed and computing the length anyway?

Jeen

Received on Thursday, 3 November 2011 23:40:46 UTC