What's in a name - Part 3 Comment 2

From Simia
Jump to navigation Jump to search

 What's in a name - Part 3 Comment 1

What's in a name - Part 3

What's in a name - Part 3 Comment 3 

Denny, 10 January 2005 17:25 CET

Hi Richard,

you are totally right - the example fails. But I took it on purpose, nevertheless: because humans, when they read the predicate "foaf:interest" will think that it means that Subject is interested in the Object.

You are right - and I point it out in the Blog - it actually means the Subject is interested in the Topic of the Object. But I think this is an (intentional) bug in the FOAF-specification. Intentional in order to make writing FOAF-files easier, a bug nevertheless because it creates a cognitive difference between the expected naive and intented specified use of "foaf:interest".

I wanted to stress this cognitive difference with this example. The second reason for selecting this example is to make the reader wary of such subtle differences and mistakes that can happen everywhere. Anything claimed about the Semantic Web should be taken with care, no matter who claims it!

Thanks for your comments, denny


16:25:00, 10 January 2005 +
Text"Text" is a predefined property that represents text of arbitrary length and is provided by Semantic MediaWiki.
Hi Richard,

you are totally right - the eHi Richard,

you are totally right - the example fails. But I took it on purpose, nevertheless: because humans, when they read the predicate "foaf:interest" will think that it means that Subject is interested in the Object.

You are right - and I point it out in the Blog - it actually means the Subject is interested in the Topic of the Object. But I think this is an (intentional) bug in the FOAF-specification. Intentional in order to make writing FOAF-files easier, a bug nevertheless because it creates a cognitive difference between the expected naive and intented specified use of "foaf:interest".

I wanted to stress this cognitive difference with this example. The second reason for selecting this example is to make the reader wary of such subtle differences and mistakes that can happen everywhere. Anything claimed about the Semantic Web should be taken with care, no matter who claims it!

Thanks for your comments, dennylaims it!

Thanks for your comments,

denny +
Number"Number" is a type and predefined property provided by Semantic MediaWiki to represent numeric values.
2 +