this text was originally in “TriplesBad.”
So I want to represent:
"Alex Schroeder put 6 simple ideas on his page, and they are..."
Well, let’s have at it:
"Alex Schroeder" wikihomepage AlexSchroeder;
AlexSchroeder says (wikiway doesnt scale;
wikiway neednot scale;
design matters;
multilingualsites good;
multilingualpages bad;
complexdiagrams require explanation;
simplediagrams require memorable)That’s pretty fair. I like that representation. That would make me happy as far as SemanticNetworksForSearch goes.
“Happy” requires elaboration--
I mean that the data is manageable, and I can write nice queries like:
?who says (wikiway ?relation scale)
…which will tell me who had something to say about whether the wikiway scales or not, and how it scales or not, and so on.
?what good
?what bad
?who says (?what good)
…and so on, and so forth.
I feel fairly comfortable with the representation.
But, if I attempt to do that in pure triples, … Yikes!
AlexSchroeder says wikiwaydoesntscale AlexSchroeder says wikiwayneednotscale wikiwaydoesntscale subject wikiway wikiwaydoesntscale predicate doesnt wikiwaydoesntscale object scale wikiwayneednotscale subject wikiway wikiwayneednotscale predicate neednot wikiwayneednotscale object scale
…and, great joy to the person who’s always writing queries to make reasoners that can reason conclusions over “what scales” and “what doesn’t scale” and whether AlexSchroeder said it or not.
Note: This is tangential, and ContextProblem should probably become it’s own page.
The syntax of expressing context is trivial.
foo bar ( a b c; d (x y) f )
The difficulty I see with introducting context, is specifying queries- there are many queries that are very tricky to write:
You may want to keep a relative depth, for instance, you may want specific context paths, you may want specific paths to match or not to match; I suspect there are other difficulties as well.
This doesn’t mean contexts are a bad idea- the hard-to-express things are not a loss. It just means that there is some non-trivial “hard to reach” stuff.
I’ve been doing a fair bit more thinking into the subject.
( see: LionKimbroScratch?0000 )
I’m starting to think that queries involving contexts are non-trivial:
I’m wondering:
The version for normal Triple-based spaces, is the AND operation: the single operation of AND-ing is immensely useful, and gives you great power.
Is there such a single manipulation, involving contexts, that is similarly useful?
Regardless: I think I’ll be backing away from contexts.
If I ever approach the subject again, I’d do two things:
One important clarification: I’m interested in the ContextProblem as interpreted by engineers, not psychologists. Using Knowledge In Its Context: Report on the IJCAI-93 Workshop makes the distinction clear.
The simple query system should:
Hmm, I think this is one of those things that people have worked on a lot and yet a solution that makes everyone happy has not yet been found.
Do you have links to solutions, or know the names of solutions, that don’t make everyone happy?
No, it’s something I’ve been meaning to learn about someday though. I just have vague memories of seeing webpages or discussion threads where people list different approaches and then show why each one is annoying in some situations. MurrayAltheim would probably know. If you find such a list, let me know, I’d like to learn it.