This article is an aggregation of thoughts I had while working on one of my recent semantic web projects. I have no idea what these ideas worth, but I hope to open a discussion regarding the problematic described bellow.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The problematic<\/strong><\/p>\n What is beautiful with the semantic web is that anyone can define anything about anything. I can define myself; I can define a project; I can define a car; Etc.<\/p>\n What is so beautiful and powerful is also a huge problem and probably the bigger weakness of the semantic web.<\/p>\n In fact, I can define myself with a FOAF profile. This FOAF profile describes relations about me. But nothing stops anybody to define other relations about me. One can describe good things about me, but one can describe bad things as well.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How does it happen?<\/strong><\/p>\n Readers: you will need some understanding of semantic web concepts to read the rest of that article.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n Basically, I can use any URI (unique resource identifier) to describe relations about me. But anybody can define new relations with that URI as well.<\/p>\n The problem arises if I get each RDF files from these two people and that I index them in the same triple store. Then I would get many relations (defined by two different people) for the same subject: me.<\/p>\n Do you see what the situation is starting to look like?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Same as Wikipedia<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, the problem seems to be the same as Wikipedia\u2019s. In fact it is the same thing, except that Wikipedia is centralized on a same infrastructure, and that the semantic web is a decentralized over the Web.<\/p>\n Since we can\u2019t restrict people to use a URI to describe it, we have to find another solution.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Some possible solutions<\/strong><\/p>\n Possible solutions exist. By example, people indexing these documents could only index URI that are dereferenceable (this mean an URI I can look up over the HTTP protocol to get a RDF file about the identified resource).<\/p>\n That way, they would restrict Bob to define anything about my URI from another web server than my own.<\/p>\n A variant of that solution would be to get documents only from a list of trusted resources (like most of the current memetrackers does).<\/p>\n However all these solutions downgrade the power of RDF: defining anything about anything. This mean that if I want, I can define everything about my dog \u201cbud\u201d even if he is not resolvable over HTTP.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another solution: a Wikipedia like supervising authority<\/strong><\/p>\n One solution could be to create an authority that would supervise the evolution of the description of URIs in the semantic web.<\/p>\n You should see the interface as the one of Wikipedia expect that we would not use WikiWords but URI to define things.<\/p>\n So people could register to that \u201cauthority\u201d. They could define things about these URIs. Conflicted URIs could be tagged as is. Discussions about URI description could be open, Etc. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n How such a system could be use as a solution to the problematic?<\/strong><\/p>\n The authority could create an ontology to define that \u201cmeta-information\u201d about URIs. Then, they would get all the information from the service and publish it in RDF using the ontology.<\/p>\n From that point, everybody that display information about URIs could add the \u201cmeta-information\u201d about URIs in their results. That way, their users would see if false information is included into the result, if the things defined for the URI (the subject) are conflicted, etc.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n For semantic web developers this solution is as simple as indexing RDF data into a triple store: (1) download (2) index (3) query and (4) display.<\/p>\n This solution is not perfect, but it could help developers to display meaningful information to their system users while keeping the description power of RDF.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Technorati: Semantic<\/a> | web<\/a> | wikipedia<\/a> | description<\/a> | uri<\/a> | spam<\/a> | subjects<\/a> | topics<\/a> | entities<\/a> | <\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This article is an aggregation of thoughts I had while working on one of my recent semantic web projects. I have no idea what these ideas worth, but I hope to open a discussion regarding the problematic described bellow. The problematic What is beautiful with the semantic web is that anyone can define […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-semantic-web","category-web"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fgiasson.com\/blog\/media\/wikipedia_meet_semweb_01.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n