Re: SemWeb Non-Starter -- Distributed URI Discovery

On Apr 4, 2005, at 11:31, ext Jeremy Carroll wrote:

> Al Miles wrote:
>>> Second, there is a more general discovery requirement which can be 
>>> loosely phrased as, 'I want to find out what x said about y,' or, 
>>> 'who said what about what?'  I have no ideas for how to solve that.
> Patrick Stickler wrote:
>> The question "what resource is identified by this URI and what is it 
>> like"
>> is a more fundamental question than the questions above.
>
> On the Web we never can access the resource, only represemtations.
> On The SW the question "what resource is identified by this URI" is in 
> essence unanswerable.

Hmmm...  I'm trying to grok how I might best rephrase the
question in a more practical form to avoid philosophical
nuances.

Perhaps "what is the core, authoritative body of knowledge provided by
the owner of this URI which describes the resource identified by the 
URI?"

> The right question is Alistair's.

My point was that there is no single "right question". There are 
several.

*A* right question is certainly Alistair's.

*Another* right question is the one I pose above (hopefully better
worded than previously).

>
> A google like system seems to be a plausible answer, we just need an 
> economic model for it.

A google like system is certainly a part of the answer, but we
also need access to authoritative descriptions of resources in
an analogous manner to how we now have access to authoritative
representations.

One reason why the web is a success is because it is distributed,
not centralized. One does not have to be aware of third party
centralized repositories of representations in order to ask for
one, given a particular URI. One just asks the web authority of
the URI. Yes, centralized repositories (or indexes) of representations
such as google are tremendous tools, but they simply augment the
fundamental architecture of the web.

GET is to MGET as GOOGLE is to SPARQL

Given a particular URI, and no further knowledge, one could
ideally obtain an authoritative description of the resource
identified by that URI from the web authority of the URI.

But yes, there will also be tremendous benefit from centralized
knowledge repositories from which one can query third party
knowledge, which may very well have as much or even more value
than the authoritative knowledge.

But a centralized solution to knowledge discovery cannot be
the foundational or primary solution if we are to see
global, ubiquitous scalability achieved for the SW in the
same manner as has been achieved for the web.

Cheers,

Patrick


>
> Jeremy
>
>

Received on Monday, 4 April 2005 09:07:31 UTC