Re: AW: AW: Distributed querying on the semantic web

Leo Sauermann wrote:

> The social practice of not domain stealing is here today and not 5 years
> ago. I remember some discussions about domain stealing, people where not
> happy about it, also in this list.
> 
> 

[ very big snip ]
> 
> so you aren't even allowed to change the meaning of your own URIs :-)))
> don't try to change the meaning of other people's uris?!

But but but ...

meaning isn't like that ... take dc:creator, we can go and look at the 
definition, which took a lot of effort on the part of the DC community, and 
we can go and look how it is used; which may, in subtle ways, suggest 
different twists of meaning, particularly when used in certain contexts, 
that are not explicit in the definition. For example, a dc:creator triple 
on an OWL Test case description (in a Manifest file), indicates the name of 
a person who was responsible for first writing down the initial idea - 
often this was quite a rough sketch, and at least sometimes this was even 
in a different syntax from the actual test. I felt this was a legitimate 
use of dc:creator; but a different point of view would have made me 
dc:creator of many more of the tests for example for creating the first 
published version of the test (a job that I saw as editorial). I do not 
believe that DC legislates one way or the other on this issue (in fact they 
seem to try hard not to).


The meaning of words in natural language drifts with usage; I see no reason 
to expect the Semantic Web to be immune from this phenomenon.

I have sympathies on both sides of this discussion.

Jeremy

Received on Wednesday, 21 April 2004 05:23:27 UTC