- From: Krzysztof Janowicz <janowicz@ucsb.edu>
- Date: Mon, 26 Nov 2018 21:51:35 -0800
- To: Thomas Passin <tpassin@tompassin.net>, semantic-web@w3.org
On 11/26/18 8:55 PM, Thomas Passin wrote: > On 11/26/2018 9:49 PM, David Booth wrote: >> It is hard for very smart people to see why concepts that are simple >> to them are *not* so simple for others who have significantly less >> intellectual horsepower. Typically it is not any one concept that >> makes a subject too hard, but the totality of the interaction >> between multiple concepts, each with its own exceptions and caveats, >> that pushes the user over his/her mental threshold of "too hard". > > It's not necessarily the case of not enough horsepower. Being able to > read and digest the content of formal specifications, and being able > to put that to use, isn't easy. It's very abstract, even more > abstract than a lot of everyday programming. A lot of folks just > don't do that well. It's been remarked before in this thread (I think > by you?) that there isn't a lot of good tutorial material out there on > how to understand and use RDF-related tools and data design. > > If you mean to make it easier for the middle ranks of programmers to > work with linked data, then those people are going to have to > understand quite a lot about semantics - since it's probably rare for > two data sets to have exactly the same semantics for things that are > apparently the same - and about data cleaning, truth maintenance, and > imputation of missing data. Absent those things, for someone to > blithely forge ahead linking data right and left is only going to > cause trouble. > > So arguably it will be important to make *those* things easier for > middle rank workers to understand and deal with. RDF details, not so > much. We could probably put together a profile that disallows certain > RDF usages and encourages certain idioms, and be done with that part > of it. Then the hard work would start. > > TomP > > I have to say that the entire argument about the limited /intellectual horsepower/ strikes me as odd to a point where it may hinder us as a community to admit that there is room for improvement (which the discussion here is all about). To recall just one example, a group of ontology engineers argued last year over the relation between owl:class and rfds:class, particularly also with respect to (legacy) tool support. As we could not fully agree, we asked two people we trusted would certainly be able to come up with a clear recommendation. Unfortunately, their answers seemed not to align very well with one another but after a few more iterations we got it sorted out: simply using owl:class and rdfs:class together to type each class in our ontology would be 'most certainly harmless' [quote]. This is what we ended up doing. I also vividly recall how we decided to describe our ontology in a minimal fashion (really just stating that it is a vocabulary, has a creator, follows a certain license, and has a preferredNamespacePrefix) and ended up with a combination of vann, voaf, foaf, and dcterms. As your fellow non-SW 'developer' friends would confirm, this is not normal. Thanks to everybody for having this lively discussion, Krzysztof -- Krzysztof Janowicz Geography Department, University of California, Santa Barbara 4830 Ellison Hall, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4060 Email: jano@geog.ucsb.edu Webpage: http://geog.ucsb.edu/~jano/ Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net
Received on Tuesday, 27 November 2018 05:52:00 UTC