- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 16:54:29 -0800
- To: "Cameron McCormack" <cam-www-rdf-interest@aka.mcc.id.au>, <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
True, you can define a mapping, and that is nice to have if you get stuck in the inevitable situation where two different people use different terms to mean the same thing. But it's even nicer to just use a term that others are more likely to understand in the first place. IOW, the ability to map between terms is a feature to be resilient in the face of antisocial vocabularies rather than an excuse to be antisocial. > Joshua Allen: > > Well, if you want to tell someone that you are feeling cheerful, you can > > just choose to use an existing word like 'cheerful', or you can invent a > > new one. Inventing a new word and then having to explain to everyone > > who asks that "My new word really means 'cheerful'" is bound to annoy > > and is not very sociable. If, on the other hand, you don't care whether > > or not someone else understands what you are saying, because it's for > > your own consumption only, then you are also not very sociable. > > But isn't one of the major things about the semantic web that you can > declare two different URI predicates to mean the same thing (with OWL > or something) and then RDF processors will just understand it? > > Sure it may not be the best idea to start off with a complete different > vocabulary, but as soon as someone writes some RDF that equates some > terms then everything is fine.
Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2004 19:54:36 UTC