Matthias Samwald wrote:
Kingsley wrote:
A Web of Data is a Web of Data Objects. The Document Web is a Web of
Documents.
But are "data objects" not just another layer of abstraction? RDF/OWL
gives us the possibility to use URIs and ontologies to describe the
things we are interested in (districts, people, protein sequences)
without taking detours through thinking in terms of documents, data
sets, conceptualisation and other abstractions. When we say that
<http://example1.org/john_doe> owl:sameAs
<http://example2.org/john_doe>, this is a statement about an object in
reality, and not a data object (and, of course, not about a document
either). Maybe this is just a matter of semantics, and with "data
objects" you were actually referring to these objects in reality. For
me, the term "data" is strongly associated with artefacts in our
computer systems, and not objects in reality.
Objects are vehicles of Data Access (by value or reference).
Objects/Entities are instances of Classes.
At the very least <http://example2.org/john_doe> is an instance of a
owl:Thing even before we get to foaf:Person.
Anyway, you raise an interesting point as you've given me a reminder to
share the following with anyone confused or unsure about Distributed
Objects and the Web.
Read: http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/9703-web-apps-essay.html
Kingsley
We have to do a better job of explaining what Object Identity is about
in the context of the Linekd Data Web, especially as this is an area of
computer science that predates the Web.
I think foundational ontologies such as DOLCE [1] and BFO [2] could be
of great utility for clarifying how identities of objects and classes
are defined. I guess that such 'strict' approaches to ontology
engineering are currently not very popular in the LOD community, but I
think that their value will soon be recognized when the LOD dataset
cloud grows -- and more and more questions about the actual meaning of
'sameAs' and 'equivalentClass' arise. At least, this was the case with
the complex RDF/OWL datasets we are dealing with in the life science
and health care community [3].
[1] http://www.loa-cnr.it/DOLCE.html
[2] http://www.ifomis.org/bfo
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/hcls-kb/
Cheers,
Matthias Samwald
Semantic Web Company, Austria // DERI Galway, Ireland
http://www.semantic-web.at/
http://www.deri.ie/
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
