Re: Well Behaved RDF - Taming Blank Nodes, etc.

Hi Pat,

On Fri, 2012-12-14 at 23:52 -0800, Pat Hayes wrote:
> >>> On 12/13/2012 2:00 AM, Pat Hayes wrote:
> >>>> Another example: a picture of some celebrity standing next to a
> horse. I have a URI for the celebrity, but I don't have and don't need
> one for the horse [ . . . ]

> I don't need, and shouldn't have to invent, a URI for something that
> does not need to be identified. Particularly if in fact I cannot
> identify the thing in quesiton. Inventing a URI to "identify" an
> anonymous horse or an unknown room in a building is simply a mis-use
> of the very idea of a URI as being a universal identifier. 

[The following comment is moot with respect to Well Behaved RDF, because
as Lee showed, you could use Well Behaved RDF and still have an implicit
blank node for the horse, but . . . ]

I can see that you may find it inconvenient to mint a URI for the horse,
but I vehemently disagree with the idea that it would be a mis-use of a
URI.  As the AWWW states:
http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-benefits 
"A resource should have an associated URI if another party might
reasonably want to . . . make or refute assertions about it . . . ."
The fact that *you* chose to make an RDF statement about that horse is
pretty strong evidence that someone else may eventually want to make
statements about it also.  One doesn't have to know a lot about a
resource to mint a URI for it.  Something like this would suffice:

 :some-photo :depicts :ann-romney ,
     :romney-horse-2012-07-25 .
 :romney-horse-2012-07-25 a :Horse ;
     rdf:label "Horse standing next to Ann Romney 2012-07-25" .


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

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Received on Sunday, 16 December 2012 04:05:33 UTC