[NLP2RDF] [Corpora-List] Announcement: NLP Interchange Format (NIF) 1.0 Spec, Demo and Reference Implementation

[Michael Brunnbauer]

Hello John,

On Sat, Dec 03, 2011 at 08:58:47PM -0500, John F. Sowa wrote:
> Unfortunately, RDF is wrong in so many ways that it is hard to summarize
> them.  There is nothing wrong with having a readable human notation that
> compiles into an unreadable but efficient computer version.  But the
> RDF/XML notation is so bloated that it is horribly inefficient for
> computer processing, network transmission, and storage.

So what ? Everybody can use other serializations like N3 or Turtle.

> At the semantic level, a serious flaw of RDF is the complete lack of
> typing.  There is no way to indicate that a URI is intended to represent
> a literal (the URI itself),

Do you mean the things I can express with xsd:anyURI and 
http://purl.org/NET/uri ? Whats wrong with that ?

> the document identified by the URI, the content of that document

HTTP URIs by default refer to the document you get at that address. If you
need to refer to something else, you use hash URIs or httpRange-14. Although
there are never ending discussions about this I do not find it too complicated.

> or the result of evaluating that content
> (if it happens to contain some executable or interpretable language).

This does not seem to me like a common use case but again: Why not do this
with hash URIs or httpRange-14 ?

> But RDFa has nothing in common with RDF/XML
> other than the three letters R, D, and F.

Huh ? RDFa and RDF/XML share the RDF model. They are both used to express
triples.

> GoodRelations is an ontology that happens to be expressed in OWL.
> But if you look at the actual OWL statements, you'll notice that
> they don't use any features of OWL that could not be expressed
> in Aristotle's original syllogisms. In fact, the overwhelming
> majority of sites that claim to use OWL don't go beyond Aristotle.

How do you express property restrictions like SymmetricObjectProperty,
TransitiveProperty or InverseFunctionalProperty with categorical syllogisms ?

GoodRelations has TransitiveProperty restrictions and I have seen 
InverseFunctionalProperty restrictions in many ontologies.

Of course OWL can be more powerful but I doubt that people would come up
with more complex restrictions if we would not use OWL but something else.

> As for Tim Bray, he apologized for the mistakes in RDF.  As Tim said,
> "It's the syntax, stupid."  See his web site:
> 
>    http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/21/RDFNet

He apologizes for the mistakes in RDF/XML and actually defends RDF:

 "I think the RDF model is the right way to think about this kind of stuff, and I firmly believe that the killer app is lurking in the weeds out there, if we can get out fron under the ten-thousand-pound deadweight of the current syntax."

> As I said, that model can be expressed more easily in LISP or JSON.

And people do that. So what is the problem ?

> For a linguist, calling those triples a "subj-pred-obj model" is so
> hopelessly naive that there is no way they could take it seriously.

This naming may be confusing to people with prior exposure to logic or
linguistic but may be good for people without such exposure.

> The FOAF work is more popular because it is at a very low level
> that does not require any knowledge of logic, ontology, or
> linguistics. 

>From the viewpoint of the creator of a FOAF document, yes.

But from the viewpoint of the application writer or data aggregator,
the FOAF ontology declares things like foaf:mbox and foaf:weblog as inverse
functions properties which enables reasoning that two persons described
in different sources are actually the same person.

> That is also why the usage of schema.org is
> growing rapidly:  it doesn't use scary words like 'logic'
> or 'ontology' that frighten the unwashed masses.

Yes. And schema.org seems to translate to triples just fine so again I see
no problem.

Regards,

Michael Brunnbauer

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