[open-bibliography] owl:sameAs + congruence closure + similarity

[William Waites]

On 10-07-08 12:14, Ross Singer wrote:
>
> I agree with Bernard that the use of owl:sameAs may wind up being
> problematic in the long run and I'm not sure when, how or if it can be
> reconciled.  There's a big gulf between rdfs:seeAlso and owl:sameAs
> and, unfortunately, there's not much to use in between.  People want
> to say that they're talking about the same /thing/ as someone else but
> the only broadly accepted way to do so (currently) is to pull out the
> atomic bomb that is owl:sameAs.
>

Speaking with my desk-neighbour at the university who is
a reseacher in compilers, he thinks the notion of congruence
closure will be useful in an implementation that tries to deal
with owl:sameAs. You might pull in descriptions of everything
in the graph described by owl:sameAs relationships, pick
one (perhaps at random) to be canonical (within the program),
move all properties to that one and treat the others as
indirections.

Only if people really mean owl:sameAs when they  say
owl:sameAs though...

I think there's actually a deep philosophical problem that
underlies the gulv between dfs:seeAlso and owl:sameAs.
It's easy to assert identity and it's easy to assert similarity
in an undefined way. Defining specific, meaningful notions
of "relevantly similar in this or that way" is hard.

Cheers,
-w

-- 
William Waites           <william.waites at okfn.org>
Mob: +44 789 798 9965    Open Knowledge Foundation
Fax: +44 131 464 4948                Edinburgh, UK

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