RE: Semantic web - a fractal ongoing struggle toward greater consistency.

 

"The question is, is our current design assumption - that all URIs
always have the same meaning for all agents, so that RDF can be freely
swapped around from ontology to ontology and processed by simple
inference engines without any kind of checking for consonance of meaning
- really realistic? You seem to think that it is, that the SWeb will be
able to evolve into a global system of clear and unambiguous concepts,
each assigned uniquely to a URI. "


I agree with that topic. We have an agreed procedure of assigning uris -
and like TimBl pointed out, it works in small groups, bigger groups and
worldwide.
 
but I ran into the URI crisis last week and have decided to solve it in
this way:
ignore it.
 
I will make heavy use of rdf:type and my URLs will have more than one
type. My folder "d:\data\thesis" where I keep my diploma thesis is both
a windows file folder and also "my diploma thesis". For me, the folder
is the thesis. When I think about the folder, I think about the thesis.
When somebody asks me something about the thesis, I always miss my
folder to find the answer.
I may give the url http://www.gnowsis.com/diplomarbeit/ to my thesis,
but only when i have published it. right now it is
file://leo.ist.org/d:/data/thesis
 
And I hate URIs. I have so many URLs on my computer, I will use them
instead of making up URIs. In my mind, all my folders have a meaning.
And all my Outlook folders have, too. And in a distributed system, URLs
will also be much better.
 
In my mind, the folder IS the project. I am building a knowledge
Management system based on RDF that will be used like that.
 
Autonomous web agents will perhaps don't like this, but I don't think
that the future is in agents. the future will be in a browser that can
browse through everything. Like William Gibson's original "Matrix" from
the cyberspace sci-fi. 
 
 
Who agrees here, that a File Folder could also be a project, with the
same URL ?
 
 
 
 
Isn't the USER the most important fact here ? 
 
 
greetings
Leo Sauermann
 <http://www.gnowsis.com> www.gnowsis.com