Re: Distributed querying on the semantic web

On Apr 21, 2004, at 10:20, ext Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:

>> ... the web shows us that people publishing information
>> do tend to go to some lengths to ensure that it is as accessible and
>> usable as possible. I suspect that if it becomes a convention that
>> agents go to the URI when they don't have any other information,
>> people will endeavour to put useful information there.
>
> Sure, and this would be really good.  However, I firmly believe that 
> there
> must not be any requirement, or even expectation, that this is *the*
> information about a URI reference.  It must be possible, and not
> stigmatized, to have different views concerning URI references.

Having a means to obtain an authoritative description of a resource
via the URI denoting that resource does not in any way prevent the
expression of 3rd party descriptions of that resource or for there to
be any amount of disagreement about the nature of the resource in 
question.

However, there must be some way for an agent to get authoritative
information about a resource when all they have is the URI and
nothing else. That's what URIQA aims to do.

The agent is still free to obtain 3rd party descriptions from other
sources, such as respositories (e.g. sw.google.com) which harvest
and syndicate huge volumes of knowledge from the SW.

3rd party knowledge does not mean "wrong" or "untrustworthy" or "lesser
quality" knowledge (though it could be all of those things) -- it simply
means it's knowledge published by some other authority than the
managing authority of the URI denoting the resource in question.

I could use Google to harvest an RDF graph of DC defined titles
and descriptions of web pages, treating Google as a source of
(partial) descriptions of those web pages -- but Google would not
be a source of *authoritative* descriptions of those web pages
since the information in question is not coming directly from the
web authorities of the URIs themselves.

Yet the knowledge I harvest from Google could rightly be considered
to be accurate and trustworthy insofar as those web pages are
concerned.

Patrick

--

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

Received on Thursday, 22 April 2004 04:47:35 UTC