Re: [foaf-dev] fidelity vs idiom

> Of course, FOAF is no longer an idiom - once augmented like this. To be
> honest, I don't know the correct term for what kind of language FOAF is, if
> augmented with such equitable reasoning. Perhaps it's now a "fidelity"
> language (vs a mere idiom).

By idiom I mean roughly 'higher level pattern of description'. Other
RDF communities around Dublin Core sometimes talk of 'application
profiles' eg http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-dsp/
http://dublincore.org/usage/documents/profile-guidelines/ as an
attempt to pin down this slippery idea of patterns of description.
It's not quite the same as schema or ontology, since a single
description might use 2,3 or 6 different schemas...

cheers,

Dan

I much prefer your conception, than application profile. I come from the ISO world, where abstract syntaxes, types and notations could engender entire families of derived standards - profiled for European procurement world, or some application community as an "application profile". In that conception of the abstracting typing world, Microsoft ActiveDirectory is just an application profile of X.500, tuned to the enterprise internet community and using ldap protocols as the concrete embodiment of an abstract directory service. It's very mid 80s. John Larmouth at salford uni was big into this, from which we got the entire world of ASN.1....and all its notation-centric language theory (that beget ISO PKI types, and their IETF SSL applicability, and then the turning towards W3C https, and now RDF-community's FOAF+SSL...).

In that original RDF core debate, one sees the web-centric aspects being debated. Is the web RDF's to enable language design, or be a universal language? Evidently, the designer-tooling camp won out. But, what the debate reveals is the limits of RDF's core when addressing web dynamics and scale - in which there are few stable points to reference. And those limits are simply today's limits present in the philosophy of logic, as applied to computer science. Presumably, in 100 years folks will be laughing when looking back at our intellectual incompetence...

I've consistently said that I liked the original web of trust schema - BECAUSE it was focused at a core problem of PROVIDING some fixed point in the engineering of the web. It was of philosophical importance; being not worried about applicability to signed emails, or law, or whatever.

So, I propose that the relationship addition to FOAF might specifically include, amongst others, those relationships that allow one party to make certain CORE fidelity statements about another (or a thing in the foaf universe that another has made). That is, take the learning and understanding from the original WOT, and include as std examples of relationships what that earlier attempt at formalized statement making was trying to address.

Now you have a breakthrough. You've upgraded the abstract framework, and it's got applicability to certain trust/fidelity topics whose basic intuitions its taken us collectively 10 years to understand. Being merely semi-formalized intuitions vs semantics (at this stage), they fit with the proposal to leverage certain (non OWL-FULL) relationship constructs.

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