Representing things RE: RDF and speech acts

Hi Leo,

actually FOAF doesn't use the same mechanism as WordNet.

My understanding of best practice is that a bare URI will often be understood
to refer to the thing that gets returned - i.e. the page. So if you want to
use the wordnet entry for love, it is better to define some "definition"
fragment for all wordnet, such as

  http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/love-4#defn

and this can clearly identify anything you want, but doesn't mean "the page
itself".

FOAF gets around the desire to do this by using a blank Node to identify a
Person -

the person whose email address is mailto:foo@example.net

Or in RDF

<rdf:RDF xmlns="I forget right now"
         xmlns:foaf="the foaf namespace">
<foaf:Person>
  <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:foo@example.net"/>
</foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

I think for foaf:interest it suggests you use a URI though. The indirection
trick here is neat in that it is relatively easy to apply:

[concept] [described by] [the relevant Wordnet page]

but may be a bit clunkier to use.

(There's a fair bit of discussion around on this topic...)

Cheers

Chaals

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, Leo Sauermann wrote:

>
>
>I would be interested in that, too. We are missing some philosophical
>stuff here. If you find anything, please post it here.
>
>
>I remember the "URI crisis", that tackles the question of "what does a
>URI identify?". Especially the problem of "how do i represent love?"
>
>http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/identitycrisis.html
>http://www.w3.org/2002/11/dbooth-names/dbooth-names_clean.htm
>http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTTP-URI
>
>
>
>Here is something cut/n/pasted from my diploma thesis about identifying
>general concepts (like "red"):
>
>A URI can be used to identify an abstract concept. Again we have an
>example, the identification of  the concept of "love". A solution here
>would be to use WordNet  identifiers for the meaning of English words,
>as Dan Brickley suggested in [Brickley2001]. According to his definition
>(and a correction by Libby Miller [Miller2003]), "love" could be
>expressed with this URI.
>
>"http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/love-4".
>Figure 6 The "Love" URI
>
>Some common concepts can be identified with this method, Dan Brickley
>and Libby Miller used it to identify the concept of a "person" in their
>FOAF, project. [FOAF].

Received on Tuesday, 25 November 2003 12:17:33 UTC