Matthew Cockerill wrote:
> I am coming to this (and I think Alf too) from the perspective of
> wanting to develop practical services about actual stuff, as opposed
> to operating in domain neutral RDF world.
I am also a very very practical developer who wants to use RDF in some
very specific domains (see previous recent posts for example).
> These services would build on top of all the abstract RDF stuff.
I don't know, I've been looking at Semantic Bank and Sesame 2.0 and it
looks fairly non-abstract to me actually. But I guess it depends on what
you're looking for.
> But ultimately, we need to boil things down to a few practical things
> that we know how to deal with. i.e. the infinite regress has to
> bottom out somewhere, on some leaf nodes, which are taken as atoms to
> actually mean something. info URIs are one way to provide this. This
> may be philosophically inelegant, but it seems to me pragmatically
> invaluable.
I'm still not following why the "type as metadata about URI" is not
adequate.
> In terms of the suggestions that have been made for alternatives:
>
> If I have came across 2 URIs:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=0393060349
> and also: http://isbn.org/madeupresolver?039-3-06034-9
>
> Using those alternatives, how would I as an application developer
> know that they were corresponded to the same entity?
If that is all you have, then you're screwed. But the infoURI thing does
not seem to help much. In this case it would perhaps be better if a "de
facto" standard about ISBN's emerged, e.g. "ISBN's are handled by
isbn.org" so that even Wikipedia would be using the isbn.org style
instead of its own. That is, if they truly want it to refer to the same
thing as the isbn.org URI.
I guess this mindset is similar to the Folksonomy ideas around tagging,
where things emerge naturally instead of forcefully. But I may be naive
and unrealistic about it. I don't know.
/Rickard
--
Rickard Öberg
rickard.oberg_at_senselogic.se
_at_work +46-(0)19-173036
Received on Tue Nov 15 2005 - 10:43:54 EST