Re: Distributed querying on the semantic web

On Apr 20, 2004, at 09:19, ext Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:

>
>
> From: "Phil Dawes" <pdawes@users.sourceforge.net>
> Subject: Re: Distributed querying on the semantic web
> Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 22:03:05 +0100
>
>>
>> Hi Peter,
>>
>> From what I can gather, your concerns and objections are based around
>> issues of trust and authority - neither of which I attempted to
>> address in the original mail. I am purely attempting to address
>> the problem of information discovery in the early stages of the SW.
>
> Any scheme that requires (or even hints about something close to 
> requires)
> the use of the information in a particular document is going to be
> inextricably tied to notions of authority.  Ignoring this aspect of any
> such scheme would make the scheme a non-starter, at least for me.

The approach that URIQA presents is that information about a resource
denoted by a particular URI which is obtainable from the
web authority of the URI in question is the authoritative description
(definition, specification, etc.) of that resource, as denoted
by that particular term.

Information expressed in terms of that URI obtained elsewhere is
non-authoritative, 3rd party knowledge.

Now, an agent may choose to trust both authoritative and 3rd party
knowledge, and may even not trust some authoritative knowledge from
certain sources, but that is another issue.

Generalized query languages and web APIs will provide a means to
obtain 3rd party knowledge about resources.

URIQA aims to provide a means to obtain authoritative knowledge
about a resource from the web authority of the denoting URI. That
not only allows an agent to differentiate between claims made by
the managing authority for a given term and claims made by other
parties, but also allows one to obtain that authoritative description
having nothing but the URI alone -- hence "bootstrapping" the SW.

Whether you trust any such knowledge, regardless of its source or
method used to obtain it, is another issue entirely.

(and as for that issue of trust, the most promising approach IMO
is to use named, signed graphs, but that's another discussion...)

Patrick

--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Thursday, 22 April 2004 03:51:24 UTC