see below., On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 12:55 PM, glenn mcdonald <gl...@furia.com> 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. > *Very well put, Glenn! * > 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. > -- Michael Uschold, PhD Senior Ontology Consultant, Semantic Arts LinkedIn: http://tr.im/limfu Skype, Twitter: UscholdM