Re: Blank Nodes Re: Toward easier RDF: a proposal

This is not directly about blank nodes, but is a reply to a message in the thread.

I’m certainly agreeing that we should work towards common understanding of Thing equality.
And addresses are a great place to start.
In order for equality to be defined, I think that means you first need an idea of what an unambiguous address looks like.

Having an oracle that defines what an unambiguous Thing looks like is one organisational structure, and it would be great if schema.org could lead the way.
It particularly helps people who just want an off the shelf solution, especially if they have no knowledge of the Thing domain.

However I (and perhaps David Booth) am after something more anarchic, that can function in a decentralised way (if I dare to use that term! :-) )
For example, I might decide that I think that House Number and PostCode is enough.
(UK people will know that this is a commonly-used way of choosing an address, although it may well not be satisfactory for some purposes, I’m sure.) 
That may well be sufficient for me to interwork with datasets from Companies House, the Land Registry and a bunch of other UK-based organisations, plus many other datasets.

Having a simple standard way to create keys for such things facilitates that, without any standardisation process and all that entails in weaknesses and strengths of trying to get agreement on what an unambiguous address might look like on a world scale for all purposes.

Just generating a URI, without needing to make any service calls (having found where they are and chosen the one you want and compromised on it, etc.) or anything seems to me a way of making all the interlinking so much more accessible for us all.
It is even future proof:- using such a URI means that if it is about something new (UK postcodes change all the time :-(, and there are more dead ones than live ones), the oracle doesn’t tell me anything it didn’t have until I ask again.
In a key-generating world, my new shiny key will slowly align with all the other key URIs as they get created.

So yeah, all strength to anyone who wants to take on the central roles, but not at the expense of killing the anarchic solution, please.

Cheers

> On 3 Dec 2018, at 22:10, Anthony Moretti <anthony.moretti@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Cheers for agreeing William. On the topic of incomplete blank nodes Henry I'd give them another type, the partial address example you give I'd give the type AddressComponent, or something to that effect. I could be wrong, but it's not a valid Address if it's a blank node and no other information in the graph completes it.
> 
> Anthony
> 
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 1:56 PM William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> > standards like schema:PostalAddress should possibly define relevant
> > operations like equality checking too.
> 
> Exactly.
> 
>

Received on Monday, 3 December 2018 22:58:24 UTC