At 01:42 PM 3/5/2010, Karen Coyle wrote:
I made the mistake of using a term without identifying it, sorry. In
semantic web terms, this is a "statement":
Herman Melville -- is author of -- Moby Dick
While library records today have that same information, it doesn't
make sense outside of the record so you can't share it or link to it
in other contexts. We have separate fields for the author and the
book, and the connection between them is that they are in the same
record. But take them out of the record and the connection is lost. In
the semantic web view, each statement makes a connection between two
things, and you can string the statements together to make a web of
statements.
Two comments:
1. You stress the independence of the statements, which I agree does
give them value in a semantic web context. However, for many of us,
the more important question is how we aggregate these individual
statements into something that is meaningful in a context of
bibliographic discovery. The single statement doesn't accomplish all
that much until it is aggregated with -- or linked to -- other
statements relating to the resource that enables one to find,
identify and select that resource.
2. A reminder (one that I'm sure you would be insisting upon in other
circumstances): You represent the Person and Work entities in your
examples by text strings that are in fact particular *names* for the
entities in question, not the entities themselves. I would argue
that the statement above has a limited truth value if taken literally
(i.e., if confined to the text strings it contains), but a more
universal truth value if the text strings are taken as tokens for the
entity itself. Presumably the systems that we design will treat
entities and their names distinctly:
[Person A] -- is author of -- [Work X]
[Person A] -- has name -- Herman Melville -- and may have other names
[Work X] -- has name -- Moby Dick -- and may have other names
One of the things that makes me nervous about the semantic web world
of individual statements is that the truth value of these statements
is not assured. That is an unavoidable problem with statements on
the web, and I'm not sure there is a solution to it. However, I
would suggest that the context in which these statements are embedded
is one of the factors that enables one to assign a truth value to them.
John Attig
Penn State University
[email protected]
