[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Semantic Web Hackings
On Fri, 29 Dec 2000, Sean B. Palmer wrote: > > We're in the business of making a cartoon characture of the > > world here, not representing it in full nitpicky detail. > > The point is that there are some mailboxes that are owned by individuals, > and they should be able to be used to represent the individual that owns > them... that's the whole essence of the FOAF stuff, as well as my little > rant. But, if the owners change, or you have a dual owned mailbox or > whatever else, there is no reason that you can't have more RDF to describe > that. Yes, there's a sliding scale of usefulness. Mailboxes work much of the time; if they weren't recycled (eg. University of Bristol will put 'mailto:daniel.brickley@b...' on the available-for-use list if I leave UoB) they'd be even more useful. To some extent these problems can be avoided by carefully legalistic schema definitions, eg. foaf:personalMailbox might be defined to only relate people to mailboxes where the person is the 'first official owner' of the mailbox. And some similar hack for dual-owned mailbox. Grubby stuff, but beats having a URI scheme for people. In the end it comes down to questions of data provenance, quality and timeliness: all the schema languages and schemas in the world can't save us from out of date or innacurate information (unfortunately...). Thus, if a processor can work out that box1 and box2 are owned by the > same person, then you can use either box1 or box2 to reprsent that person > and that should cause any problems either. Yep, though I prefer to say we can use box1 or box2 'when identifying' that person, rather than as 'identifiers for' (representations of...) that person. box1 is a mailbox identifier; home.html is a homepage identifier. Both can be used to identify individual people, but it's probably counterproductive to think of them as 'identifiers' for those people. > > Point of all this being that we shouldn't conflate individuals with > > their various online representations and activities, but that we can > > nevertheless use properties of the latter to indirectly identify the > > former. > > Yes! Although by using RDF we are really making first class assumptions > here...unless the properties themselves are ambiguous. > > > (3) Fancy Semantic Web inference stuff ("don't hold your breath...") > > As above but drawing additional conclusions based on complex > > rules and re-application of (2). > > From where I'm standing, (1) seems really handy, (2) is critical to > > deploying this stuff in the grubby real world where things don't > > have URIs, and (3) is, er, something to keep an eye on. > > The point of the original example was that this is such a simple > application of (2) that it opens the door for (3) [I hope!] I suggested as > such by pointing out that if the owner of a certain mailbox is male, then > it cannnot also be female. Not too hard to represent using ontology, > surely? You could use DAML to say that male is the inverse of female. Yes, there are a lot of additional facts about vocabularies that might help one draw inferences. Mutually disjoint classes, cardinality etc. My point was that (3) should be a marketplace for hi-tech very complex data aggregation systems to battle it out, whereas (2) I'm hoping will be more of a common platform that we might eventually expect all RDF databases to do out-of-the-box. I'm not quite sure where the dividing line lies though. Dan
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