Re: The status of Semantic Web community- perspective from Scopus and Web Of Science (WOS)
Dan Brickley wrote: However it did not leave any footprint in the academic literature. We might ask why. Like much of the work around W3C and tech industry standards, the artifacts it left behind don't often show up in the citation databases. A white paper here, a Web-based specification there, ... it's influence cannot easily be measured through academic citation patterns, despite the fact that without it, the vast majority of papers mentioned in http://info.slis.indiana.edu/~dingying/Publication/JIS-1098-v4.pdf would never have existed. Btw, last summer at the ESWC SPOT2009 workshop Matthew Rowe and Jonathan Butters presented a paper that took into account online documents (blogs, standards, ), as well as the academic pdf based publishing to glean a global social network. Assessing Trust: Contextual Accountability is available here: http://spot.semanticweb.org/2009/ As far as trying to relate both spaces, this is a good piece of work. It is clear that one needs to look at the global information systems to get a coherent view. I do agree with Danbri that standard based documents go through a lot more review than academic papers. Having these online and linkable also means they can be a lot more influential. Even more so if the ideas are implemented in real useable software. Just to give a minor example: The Atom XML IETF standard I participated in developing was the culmination of years of development on RSS work. The group spent 2 years working out the details of the wording of that document. This then was incorporated into software used by millions of people. And for some reason a lot of Academic papers fail to cite web based standards, blogs or other places where ideas may have emerged. Henry
Re: Why are RDF containers (rdf:Seq etc.) so little appreciated?
Im not sure what you mean by 'stable identity', It's a slightly (possibly unorthodox) viewpoint I take during RDF editing: With a container, you can say I will edit the sequence at URI X and be sure that X stays the same, no matter how you change the elements. With a collection, the anchor changes whenever one goes from 0 elements to 1 or more elements (or vice versa). Giving a collection a stable identity seems to have been one of the motivations behind skos:OrderedCollection. but the chief problem with containers is the fact that there is no way to 'close' them. If I say that FOO is a container and A, B and C are in it, there is no way to say that this is *all* that is in it. This makes them useless for encoding structures, eg OWL syntax. Collections' overcome this difficulty. So the collection notion is widely used to layer higher-level notations onto RDF, which is probably why toolkits have special provision for them. I see the point, but it seems like one could achieve the same effect by adding an additional nil element (at the end) to a container. This does not stop you using the containers, of course. They are simple enough that you hardly need syntactic sugar, right? True. -- axel.rauschma...@ifi.lmu.de http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/~rauschma/
Re: Why are RDF containers (rdf:Seq etc.) so little appreciated?
On Feb 14, 2010, at 4:34 AM, Axel Rauschmayer wrote: Im not sure what you mean by 'stable identity', It's a slightly (possibly unorthodox) viewpoint I take during RDF editing: With a container, you can say I will edit the sequence at URI X and be sure that X stays the same, no matter how you change the elements. With a collection, the anchor changes whenever one goes from 0 elements to 1 or more elements (or vice versa). Giving a collection a stable identity seems to have been one of the motivations behind skos:OrderedCollection. Ah, I see. Ironically, this is the source of the problem. but the chief problem with containers is the fact that there is no way to 'close' them. If I say that FOO is a container and A, B and C are in it, there is no way to say that this is *all* that is in it. This makes them useless for encoding structures, eg OWL syntax. Collections' overcome this difficulty. So the collection notion is widely used to layer higher-level notations onto RDF, which is probably why toolkits have special provision for them. I see the point, but it seems like one could achieve the same effect by adding an additional nil element (at the end) to a container. No, you can't. The problem is that this would (if it were effective) make the logic nonmonotonic. Put another way, objects described in RDF cannot have 'state' in the computational sense. They cannot 'change' by adding new assertions. Whatever was true before you say the new stuff has to stay true afterwards. So you can't take a container and *change* the elements it has, eg go from 0 to 1 elements, by adding assertions. The great advantage of lists is, when you add an element to a list, you are in fact creating a new list: the old list is still around and is still what it was before the addition. This is why lists (collections) work in RDF, more or less, while containers don't. That is, RDF containers, so called, are not really containers in the usual sense one would think of when talking about data structures. This is also why lists don't have what you call a stable identity: what you want is the longer list after the addition to be the *same list* with a changed state, but that isn't possible in RDF because there is no state to change. Pat This does not stop you using the containers, of course. They are simple enough that you hardly need syntactic sugar, right? True. -- axel.rauschma...@ifi.lmu.de http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/~rauschma/ IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola(850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Re: Why are RDF containers (rdf:Seq etc.) so little appreciated?
On 2/14/10 5:58 PM, Pat Hayes wrote: On Feb 14, 2010, at 4:34 AM, Axel Rauschmayer wrote: Im not sure what you mean by 'stable identity', It's a slightly (possibly unorthodox) viewpoint I take during RDF editing: With a container, you can say I will edit the sequence at URI X and be sure that X stays the same, no matter how you change the elements. With a collection, the anchor changes whenever one goes from 0 elements to 1 or more elements (or vice versa). Giving a collection a stable identity seems to have been one of the motivations behind skos:OrderedCollection. Ah, I see. Ironically, this is the source of the problem. I'm not really sure that Giving a collection a stable identity was the motivation for skos:OrderedCollection. As a matter of fact, I don't see why a List should always have a less stable identity than a SKOS ordered collection... Antoine but the chief problem with containers is the fact that there is no way to 'close' them. If I say that FOO is a container and A, B and C are in it, there is no way to say that this is *all* that is in it. This makes them useless for encoding structures, eg OWL syntax. Collections' overcome this difficulty. So the collection notion is widely used to layer higher-level notations onto RDF, which is probably why toolkits have special provision for them. I see the point, but it seems like one could achieve the same effect by adding an additional nil element (at the end) to a container. No, you can't. The problem is that this would (if it were effective) make the logic nonmonotonic. Put another way, objects described in RDF cannot have 'state' in the computational sense. They cannot 'change' by adding new assertions. Whatever was true before you say the new stuff has to stay true afterwards. So you can't take a container and *change* the elements it has, eg go from 0 to 1 elements, by adding assertions. The great advantage of lists is, when you add an element to a list, you are in fact creating a new list: the old list is still around and is still what it was before the addition. This is why lists (collections) work in RDF, more or less, while containers don't. That is, RDF containers, so called, are not really containers in the usual sense one would think of when talking about data structures. This is also why lists don't have what you call a stable identity: what you want is the longer list after the addition to be the *same list* with a changed state, but that isn't possible in RDF because there is no state to change. Pat This does not stop you using the containers, of course. They are simple enough that you hardly need syntactic sugar, right? True. -- axel.rauschma...@ifi.lmu.de http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/~rauschma/ IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 mobile phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Re: Academic publishing and the Web [was Re: The status of Semantic Web community- perspective from Scopus and Web Of Science (WOS)]
Danny Ayers wrote: Irrespective, don't you think HTML or even better an RDF (re. your data sources) would be sort of congruent with this entire effort? Dan and others could have just slotted URIs into the RDF etc.. and the resource could just grow and evenly rid itself of its current contextual short-comings etc.. Absolutely. (The kind of data-heavy material Ying Ding has produced would be an ideal candidate for expression in a data-oriented form). Sorry (for grumpy sounding comment), but PDFs really get under my skin as sole mechanism for transmitting data when conversation is about the Semantic Web Project etc.. Sadly, this realm is rife with PDF as sole information delivery mechanism, even when the conversation is actually about the Web (a medium not constructed around Linked PDF documents). Again, absolutely (and it annoys the tits off me too) - not only pdf but also ps, and in the odd strange case MS doc format. Alas it seems academia is largely slow on the uptake when it comes to publication. I'm sure this is just as frustrating for the individual that wishes to be published as the rest-of-the-world that wants their information. But then again, we still have printed matter... Yeah, and the essence of open data access (pre and post Web) has been to yank those entities referenced in the printed matter into alternative projection surfaces, guided by context :-) Kingsley Cheers, Danny. -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen President CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
