On 5/18/11 4:26 PM, Marco Neumann wrote:
Glenn,
it's not feasible, nor enforceable, nor desirable to develop
ontologies entirely with random URIs as identifiers.
It really depends on the system that generates and publishes Linked Data
Objects endowed with de-referencable URIs. This isn't a new reality,
systems have worked this way for eons. This is why I continue to state:
a broken narrative is leading us down the path of carving out a 'new
island' from an established continent of computer science.
I am of the opinion that local names should indeed be designed with
meaningful names in mind last but not least to improve the ontology
engineering process.
The Name of an Entity and the Address of its Representation are
distinct. The Name/Address ambiguity matter is universal to all realms
when Named Entities are associated with actual Representations.
Though that said there might be exceptions such as NLP and ML where
automatic tagging and ontology creation with random URIs can useful,
but that's a special use case.
No. Please digest my comments above.
Kingsley
Marco
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 3:55 PM, glenn mcdonald <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I agree wholeheartedly that URIs should be pure identifiers, with
no embedded semantics or assumptions of readability. And I agree
with Kingsley that there's an elephant in the room. I might even
agree with Kingsley about what the elephant is.
But to say it from my point of view: machines need to think in
ids, people need to think in names. The RDF/SPARQL "stack", such
as it is, has not internalized the implications of this duality,
and thus isn't really prepared to support both audiences properly.
Almost all the canonical examples of RDF and SPARQL avoid this
issue by using toy use-cases with semi-human-readable URIs, and/or
with literals where there ought to be nodes. If you try to do a
non-trivial dataset the right way, you'll immediately find that
writing the RDF or the SPARQL by hand is basically intractable. If
you try to produce an human-intelligible user-interface to such
data, you'll find yourself clinging to rdfs:label for dear life,
and then falling, falling, falling...
In fact, there's almost nothing more telling than the fact that
rdfs:label is rdfS! This is in some ways the most fundamental
aspect of human/computer data-interaction, and RDF itself has
essentially nothing to say about it.
--
Marco Neumann
KONA
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Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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