[topicmapmail] PSIs?

[Murray Altheim]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> * Murray Altheim
> | 
> | RDF has created a set of URIs that correspond roughly to a subset of
> | XSD's datatypes, then added a few of their own and deprecated use of
> | some of the XSD ones. And those URIs are OWL's creation -- they
> | don't point into the XSD spec, just use its namespace (base URI).
> 
> Sure, we agree on that.
> 
> | IOW, RDF did exactly what I'm proposing, i.e., creating a new set of
> | URIs, except they don't point anywhere.  Mine at least point
> | *actually* to the place in the XSD where a human can get a
> | definition. I chose deliberately *not* to use the OWL ones because
> | they're broken in this sense.
> 
> I didn't notice that they did not resolve, so that means that if you'd
> followed what I said you wouldn't have conformed to the OASIS rules.
> I was wrong, sorry about that.

Yes, I've read the PSI recommendations.

> | I could use the OWL ones, but I'd gain nothing. 
> 
> You would: only a single set of URIs. On the other hand, you'd lose
> conformance to the OASIS recommendations and the nice property that
> the URIs would resolve to the documentation. It's a trade-off.

I think you have it backward. The OWL URLs don't resolve. Mine do.
And my guess, based on the placeholder document at the W3C, is that
their plan (now several years waiting) is to have them resolve not
to a human-readable document but to an RDF one.

You might note that the set I've created uses the TOC from the XSD
Recommendation as the binding points, since they are stable and
do point to the documentation for each datatype. The OWL ones were
created by adding the datatype name to a base URI.

> | I'd rather point at XSD directly than point at XSD via OWL via
> | RDF. That's silly. If someone thinks we need subject identity with
> | the OWL set, we can add subject identifiers within the PSI topic
> | map, either within or via a separate topic map.
> 
> In that case I'm afraid I have to confess to being a silly OWL/RDF
> poodle, because I would prefer to use the same URIs as the W3C. If you
> prefer to be some non-silly kind of TM human being that's your choice.

Well, my point was that while a lot of people pay a lot of attention
to what the W3C is doing, they don't need to. Its time is passed, its
charter finished. Now, like the Bush administration, they're looking
at the AI/KR world as their new Syria, despite having no expertise in
the area and an entire community with decades of publishing and
expertise. So they hire one small faction of that community (DL) and
claim victory. Not so fast. In the KR world the W3C has little
demonstrable traction, and to my view, that world goes on without much
regard to things like OWL, which serves only the DAML crowd. (not
trolling here, just my opinion on the matter)

On the contrary, I *like* standards bodies like ISO, ANSI, the IETF.
Vendor consortia come and go. I'm waiting.

> I've really made my point: I think having a single set of URIs is the
> most important thing (for reasons given in previous emails). If you
> think other things are more important there's not really a whole lot
> more to say.

The most important thing to say is that you can't use the W3C ones
since they don't resolve to anything.

Perhaps one useful function of my topic map will be to do what
the W3C hasn't actually done yet, i.e., to perform, in computer-
readable fashion, the actual mapping of the OWL URIs to the XSD
Recommendation. The resultant URIs-as-PSIs would be then available.

And yes, we've both talked this one to death. 'nuff said. I'll
go publish mine now. And sincerely, thanks for the feedback --
it has been helpful.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               ^

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