Re: Splitting vs. Interpreting

On Jun 16, 2009, at 2:24 PM, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

> Sorry, looks like I had an old address on file for you.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@miscoranda.com>
> Date: Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 8:23 PM
> Subject: Splitting vs. Interpreting
> To: David Booth <dbooth@hp.com>
> Cc: www-tag@w3.org
>
> You write about ambiguous and specific references here:
>
> http://dbooth.org/2007/splitting/
>
> When I worked on EARL in 2002, we had to solve httpRange-14, and we
> did it in a practical way which your splitting document reminds me of.
>
> We might want to evaluate a tool of some kind in EARL, say the W3C
> Validator. But then we didn't know whether validator.w3.org was the
> tool itself or a page about the tool. That's httpRange-14 in a
> nutshell, before it was “solved” with the 303 hack.
>
> So what we did was this:
>
> <http://validator.w3.org/> earl:tool _:Validator .
>
> The clever bit is that the earl:tool property says: if the subject is
> a Document (i.e. an IR), then the object is the Tool described by that
> document; whereas if the subject is a Tool, then the object is simply
> the same thing as the subject.

This is almost exactly the technique I suggested for use in  
bioinformatics, where people want to point to both documents about  
proteins and identifiers of actual proteins, and not worry too much  
about the distinction when they say 'sameAs'. The (crude but workable)  
suggestion was to use a special sameProteinAs property which is sameAs  
when its value is a protein but something like IsADocumentAbout when  
its value is a document. And yes, this obviously generalizes to other  
categories, and indeed one could imagine a generic sameKindOfThingAs  
which has subproperties identified by an isAbout link to a class name  
(all this in RDFS or one of the fuller OWLS, of course).

Pat Hayes

>
> And as you can imagine, this is extensible to interpreting ambiguous
> resources in all kinds of ways. Now the TAG finding says that it's
> removed a certain level of ambiguity, but there are other ambiguities
> one might want to resolve when a page 303s and then still doesn't
> define carefully what's at the end of it. So the EARL method is much
> more practical.
>
> You might also want to think a bit harder about statements such as
> “there is no architectural need for Person and IR to be considered
> disjoint”. Consider if you were using Facebook and it started
> conflating people with groups and games and so on. But of course
> people break the rules of the web until they matter, and since there's
> no Semantic Web User Agent this rule doesn't matter.
>
> I'm not saying that the TAG finding should be canned because you can
> use the kind of interpretation properties that I've described as a way
> around it. The point is rendered moot by various architectural
> problems. But you ought to compare the 2002 and 2009 architectural
> solutions carefully.
>
> -- 
> Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/
>
>
>

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Received on Wednesday, 17 June 2009 01:49:20 UTC