URIQA thwarted by context problems?

Hi Patrick,

I'm afraid that the more work I do with rdf, the more I'm having
problems seeing URIQA working as a mechanism for bootstrapping the
semantic web.

The main problem I think is that when discovering new information,
people are always required to sort out context (a point made by Uche
Ogbuji on the rdf-interest list recently).

When identifying new terms, some mechanism has to exist to decide
whether the author's definition of the term fits with its use in the
instance data, and that that tallies with the context in which the
system is attempting to use the data. To my mind this prohibits a
system 'discovering' a new term without a human vetoing and managing
its use. 

Of course this doesn't prohibit the decentralisation of such
context-management work - e.g. a third party could recommend a
particular ontological mapping of terms based on an agreed context. I
just don't see machines being able to do this work on an ad-hoc basis
any time soon.

You've been doing a lot of work on trust/context etc.. in addition to
URIQA, so I'd be interested to hear your views on this.

Many thanks,

Phil

Received on Saturday, 9 October 2004 18:14:10 UTC