[rdfweb-dev] Qualifying knows

[Ian Davis]

On Tuesday, 31 December 2002 at 15:11, Doug Ransom wrote:
> I agree with this. Knows is a fuzzy concept -- how well so I know Bill 
> Kearney? We exchanged an email once. The degree of truth of "Doug 
> knows Bill Kearney" is about 0.05.
I agree too. It's hard to rate these absolutely. Maybe I know Bill
better than you but I have never met him or spoken to him. At times
he's frustrated me, at others, delighted. I point at his weblog
occasionally, he reciprocates occasionally. Do I score my relationship
as 0.1 or 0.9?. I could possibly rate my level of trust of Bill
relative to someone else I know, i.e. a non-absolute scale of trust.

> If I know Bill, and Bill Knows Jack, what can I infer about my 
> relationship with Jack?
> - I can trust Jack less than I can trust Bill
I'm not sure that this is necessarily true.

> - I can trust Bill less than Jack trusts Bill
I don't understand how you can infer this.


> anything else we can really infer from these?
I can trust Jack more than I can trust someone I have no relationship
with.

In a way these relationships are recommendations. It's the same as
asking a neighbour for the name of a good plumber. I'm more likely to
trust that plumber than any of the plumbers I could pull out of the
telephone directory. The reason is that a bad recommendation could put
my friendship with my neighbour in jeopardy and I'm trusting my
neighbour to respect that relationship.

> Bill Kearney wrote:
>> I've said this before and I'll say it again, foaf needs some better
>> delineation
>> of grouping. "knows" without qualifiers is NOT enough. This lacking 
Have a look at Eric's relationship vocabulary[1] which provides
several qualifiers which may be useful.


-- Ian <iand at i...>
"The test of all knowledge is experiment."

[1] http://www.perceive.net/schemas/20021119/relationship/