RE: Overview of design decisions made creating stylesheet and sch ema for Artstor data

Hi Kevin
 
> It is sometimes very difficult to talk about this without sounding 
> absurd, but consider the following if you can.  Suppose there is a 
> school of the occult that teaches that every soul goes 
> through multiple 
> incarnations, and just for the sake of argument, let's 
> suppose that they 
> had through some divine means determined that J.S. Bach, and Elvis 
> happened to be the same person (qua soul).  So they diligently enter 
> that 'fact' into their database.  While that representation 
> undoubtably 
> might have value to the school of the occult, it is unlikely 
> that most 
> other schools would have any use for that information.  Clearly, even 
> though the epistemological systems interact, they must not 
> inadvertently 
> pollute the other systems.  The decision of the occult school to join 
> together those records should be available but ignored unless you are 
> working in the context of the occult.
> 
> My argument is that things like this occur to a lesser degree all the 
> time.  Equivalence shouldn't be expressed by multiple classification 
> because it is too final; rather equivalence should be expressed by 
> indexing where the index can be maintained by the 
> organizations that are 
> interested. 

Okay, I understand what you are saying now, I think I can paraphrase it:

"When we denote equivalence between two objects, there is an advantage in
keeping the equivalent objects separate, because this means it is possible
to reify the equivalence relation."

So yes, you are right, this approach does have a potential advantage. 

As I've said before, I don't like RDF's current approach to reification, I
would prefer to see it explicitly adopt a quads based approach, but even
then keeping equivalent object separate is helpful, as we can use different
provenance URIs to denote the provenance of the metadata about the first
object, provenance of the metadata about the second object, and provenance
of the metadata about the relation, so in your example we might trust our
information about JS Bach and Elvis, but not the information that indicates
they are the same person.

kind regards

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 Monday, 13 October 2003 13:53:37 UTC