URI-addressable Facts and Claims and Ontologies to Describe and Interrelate Them

W3C Semantic Web Interest Group,

I would like to propose, for purposes of discussion, a new HTML element for facts or claims. With such markup, facts or claims in HTML documents could/should have ID’s so as to be URI-addressable (for examples: https://www.news.org/article.html#fact-123 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/article#fact-123 , https://www.science.org/article.html#fact-123).

We can envision ontologies for describing and interrelating facts and claims. Some pertinent topics are indicated here. Facts can be isomorphic with one another which would typically mean that content in <fact> or <claim> elements were paraphrases. Facts or claims may have attributes or states; for example, facts can be asserted and later retracted. With respect to ontologies of facts, sets of or groups of facts may be a type of thing to be described and interrelated; for example, from a set of or group of facts or claims, one can derive or infer other sets of or groups of facts or claims. Facts or claims (and sets thereof) can agree with one another and can disagree with one another.

A standard means of indicating facts or claims such that each fact or claim were URI-addressable would facilitate a number of technologies in the public interest. Such technologies include new ontologies, web-based services, websites, software applications, content management system plugins and extensions, and Web browser extensions. For instance, one can envision Web browser extensions which provide features including visual indicators about documents’ individual facts or claims and which provide users with fact-based document navigation, e.g. navigating from an individual fact or claim to lists of documents which contain facts or claims which support or oppose that fact or claim.

In addition to new HTML markup element(s), approaches for providing URI-addressable facts and claims include, but are not limited to: (1) text fragments (https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/), (2) uses of standardized class names (e.g. <span class="w3c-fact">), (3) uses of the role attribute (e.g. <span role="fact">), (4) uses of custom elements (e.g. <fact-span>), (5) uses of Web schema (see: schema.org), (6) uses of RDFa or similar technologies, (7) uses of embedding semantics in HTML documents via <script> elements to indicate which URI-addressable document elements are facts or claims.


See also:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/facts/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology#Thing_ontologies_vs_fact_ontologies


Best regards,
Adam Sobieski