On 6/12/11 11:12 AM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
Again, this strikes me as speaking from very little experience. I
spend a good deal of my time collaboratively developing ontologies and
working with users of them. I've yet to encounter a person who didn't
understand the difference between a book about Obama and Obama.
Lin,
The example expressed by Alan is the crux of the matter. People know the
difference between 'Obama' and a 'Book' about him. Sadly, a narrative
has been constructed that leads to a really problematic misconception,
as time has proven beyond all reasonable doubt.
Here is the problem, as I know it. We are using hyperlinks as a
mechanism for data representation via HTTP URI based Names. The URI
abstraction caters for two things: Names and Addresses. When trying to
untangle the unintuitive nature of HTTP URIs as a Naming mechanism for
Things (e.g., real world entities or objects), a narrative have emerged
aimed at tacking the "hyperlink usage ambiguity problem" and its emerged
in a manner expands the ambiguity to generality whereas this is just a
function of Name mechanism choice.
Inferring that only SemWeb, LOD, and W3C folks care about the difference
between a 'Obama' and a 'Book' about him is a truly broken narrative.
People are just confused about how hyperlinks are evolving from
Addresses to Names i.e., putting to use the power inherent in the URI
abstraction such that Names resolve to Representations of their
Referents. Even worse, there's similar confusion (within LOD and SemWeb
communitis) when the issue of Resolvable Names not based on HTTP enter
the conversation.
As I've stated repeatedly, a majority of programmers and computer
scientists thoroughly understand the concepts of: de-reference
(indirection), address-of, and graph based data structures. They just
don't recognize what they already understand when reading W3C specs and
most of the LOD and SemWeb narratives.
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
