Hello! Phil Dawes' Stuff is using DISQUS, a powerful comment system, to manage its comments. Learn more.
Community Page
- phildawes.net/blog/ Jump to website »
-
Subscribe -
Community
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
-
Recent Comments
- Hi, Do you feel that your agility in Factor has improved since this post? Roger
- Thanks for the pointer - I've cleaned up the spam and regrettably added some moderation
- I'm loving the comments thread for this post. Can't decide whether to get my upholstery cleaned or do something about my fast food obesity.
- Cool - thanks Eric
- I pasted some code that does the moving sum in factor. http://paste.factorcode.org/paste?id=569#282
Jump to original thread »
Here’s a barrier to successfully using RDF URIs for identifying things collaboratively: you need to know the URI before you can use it.
If two parties create URIs for the same thing in seperation, the chances of them minting the same URI are pretty much nil. This is especially tru ... Continue reading »
If two parties create URIs for the same thing in seperation, the chances of them minting the same URI are pretty much nil. This is especially tru ... Continue reading »
3 years ago
Regarding disambiguating seperate terms for the same concept, I think this is less a problem with the scheme of identification (URIs) than it is with bad ontological modeling practice. This problem will always arise if those responsible for developing the defining vocabulary do not take advantage of existing vocabularies and start with a bottom-up approach. Ofcourse, there are issues with coming in the other direction (starting with a *universal* ontology such as SUMO/CYC and working down towards the specific domain in question): rarely will you find such an ontology that covers *every* aspect of the knowledge domain you intend to model.
"This is achieved by leveraging existing real-world semantic grounding in shared (and well known) terms, and then requiring that clients do their own work in using context to disambiguate terms."
I don't see this as an alternative way of identification but rather an emphasis on rigorous vocabulary / ontology building practices. The language-based short text tags work well in the folksonomy scenario primarily because they rely on a well mapped , universal concept model: human language. But even there, you have issues with tags such as todo, RDF_related, semantic_web_papers, and such.
Taking the time to investigate existing vocabularies that have some overlap in the domain being modelled will go a long way in eleviating such ambiguity when creating terms in a vocabulary (in the same way putting thought into the tags you use in folksonomy systems goes a long way in making such a cataloging mechanism very useful). Ofcourse there is an incredible lack of such vocabularies, mostly because the era in software development where there is an added emphasis on modeling concepts instead of data (in the purest sense) is relatively contemporary (but picking up momentum - with advancements in Semantic Technologies).
3 years ago
Hello Phil, first (and off topic) I’m a big fan of your work. I wasn’t aware that that you were also the author of BicycleRepairMan (quite an impressive software package - a shame development on it halted).
Thanks - that's very flattering. Regarding BicycleRepairMan - it's just a case of too little time I'm afraid - BRM got to the point where I was getting diminishing returns from it and there was too much other interesting stuff to do (e.g. semantic web). It does surprise me that there aren't any other refactoring browser projects for python though.
Regarding disambiguating seperate terms for the same concept, I think this is less a problem with the scheme of identification (URIs) than it is with bad ontological modeling practice. This problem will always arise if those responsible for developing the defining vocabulary do not take advantage of existing vocabularies and start with a bottom-up approach.
I think this is where our worldviews differ.
My assumption is that for the semantic web to get critical mass, lay-people are going to need to be involved in authoring the data vocabularies (as a side effect of generating data).
I don't think that a system that requires high-quality vocabularies based on rigorous ontological modelling practice will get this critical mass, because the lay-people (e.g. the vast majority of people that run a websites today) won't have thexperience or motivation to get this right.
Note that I'm not bashing experienced modellers or ontological discipline - it's just that I don't think that this can be a requirement for publishing workable data on the semantic web.
3 years ago