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

Butler, Mark wrote:

>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.
>  
>
Exactly.   If you multiclass an instance it has to be 'correct', but 
equivalence as expressed through a third party only has to be useful, 
not necessarily correct.  'Useful but not necessarily correct' is in my 
mind the basis for web style (serendipitous) data re-use.


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   Kevin Smathers                kevin.smathers@hp.com    
   Hewlett-Packard               kevin@ank.com            
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Received on Monday, 13 October 2003 17:44:49 UTC