David Huynh wrote:
John Graybeal wrote:
I think a key point of David's original post, which I would like to
emphasize, is that if I use a URL to refer to a web page, the owner
is generally either readily visible (in the URL) or discoverable (via
domain lookup). When I represent a term as a URL, it is at least
known who is serving that URL; and often the _developer_ of the term
can be derived intuitively (e.g., by dereferencing the URL in a
browser). These are positive social outcomes, and encourage further
adoption of the term.
When I represent a term as a URN or other URI that can not be
dereferenced directly in a browser, almost all of that social context
is lost. The responsible party can be found only by manually parsing
the URN, going to an obscure (to most) web page, manually looking up
the URN authority. The developer of the particular term may be
discoverable from the rest of URN -- but any semantics embedded in
the rest of the URN, if any, can only be known by finding and reading
the materials from the application of the responsible party. And the
actual metadata for the term can only be found by discovering,
through close analysis of the application or some other way, a 'magic
lookup URL' so a browser can look up the URN and provide additional
information about it.
It isn't that these problems can't be solved; eventually global URI
resolution will probably be available with browsers thanks to tricky
and consensual underlying technologies. But the initial
specifications as rolled out provided no standard way to solve them,
so until the marketplace converges, the social conventions available
with URLs are not supported.
I would quibble with some of the details of David's original
argument. Someone other than Company X can have the companyx.nnn
domain, for example. And semantic systems could use 'term rank'
methods to derive the most important URI for a term like 'microsoft',
thereby achieving at least one of Google's neat tricks in the
semantic realm. But overall, the adoption of semantic and other
URI-based technologies in the human world will inevitably lag that of
http URLs, until the technologies are so fully developed that all
these 'weaknesses' (strengths in other respects, of course) are fully
addressed.
Well put, John! Thank you--that's what I meant to say. You and I are
on the same page.
David
David / John,
Still don't get how you don't see that Entity Rank is about what you are
saying. You can only use link coefficients in the data space to
determine what entity is referenced the most, and then combine that with
associated literal objects that have text frequencies for a given text
pattern en route to making the first result set (what we do).
We expect the use to navigate by Type and/or Properties to find what
they want. This is what we actually do in real life as humans. We never
say: Find me Literals "Red Ball", we say and process: Find me an Object
of Type ball with Color property: Red.
Our UI isn't great, but we have covered the core of this matter, really.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO
OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
