Re: Use of www-rdf-dspace for comments re: early draft note, DSpace H istory System

Many things to discuss in Mark's email, but right now I just want to
tackle the highest-level one.  As observed, the proposal is to
manually revise our data to fit some more "standard" schemas.  We
could instead choose to use semantic web technology to give a
declaration of how the idiosyncratic schema map to "standard" schema,
and rely on sweb tools to perform the mapping.  

This more ambitious approach would certainly exercise the ideas of the
semantic web.  And we do want to exercise those ideas.  However, I see
value in taking the "easy way out" with respect to the dspace
repository, because it lets us factor our research agenda into two
separately challenging parts.  We all recognize the challenge of
interoprating a number of distinct rdf repositories with their own
schema, but I think that we haven't yet solved the problem of managing
a single rdf repository with a uniform schema!  I think there would be
value in creating a core of the dspace repository that doesn't need to
worry about semantic web issues.

d


   From: "Butler, Mark" <Mark_Butler@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
   Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 17:22:23 +0100 
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   These comments are much more general than the other comments, so apologies
   for this in advance. I'm sure some of the following points are controversial
   but hopefully they will create further discussion. 

   One of the promises of the semantic web is that "if person A writes his data
   in one way, and person B writes her data in another way, as long as they
   have both used semantic web tools, then we can leverage those tools to merge
   data from A and data from B declaratively i.e. without having to rewrite the
   software used by A or by B, and without necessitating them to change their
   individual data sets". Before the semantic web, we could have used data A
   with data B, but it would have necessitated some changes to the data and
   software of one or both of the parties.

   However in this proposal, it seems that rather than exploring the first path
   i.e."we have a load of data in the history system format. This was similiar
   to Harmony and Dublin Core, but since then those technologies have moved on.
   Let's see if we can map between these different data formats by using schema
   and ontology languages without changing any code" it seems like we are
   taking the second by default i.e. "we have a load of data in the history
   system format but its incompatible with the latest versions of ABC and
   Dublin Core. Let's rewrite the software that generates it so its complies
   with their latest specifications". 

   Now the problem with adopting this second approach is we aren't really
   demonstrating the utility of the semantic web. Now the history system may be
   sufficiently broken that it's just not possible to use the first approach.
   Alternatively the SW tools available may not yet be sufficiently advanced to
   support the first approach. However ideally I think we ought to at least
   explore the alternatives that try to follow approach one, assuming this is
   possible with time constraints. 

   So ideally I would like to see the descriptive note discuss more alternative
   solutions and then evaluate those solutions. At the moment it just describes
   a single solution. The outcome of the document may still be the same, i.e.
   the approach we use to solving the problem, but I think there is a bit more
   thinking or how we arrived at this point could be made explicit. 

   Dr Mark H. Butler
   Research Scientist                HP Labs Bristol
   mark-h_butler@hp.com
   Internet: http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/marbut/

Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 14:00:18 UTC