[foaf-dev] RDF triple assertions live forever?

[Story Henry]

Home page: http://bblfish.net/

On 28 Mar 2008, at 09:23, Julian Bond wrote:
> Publish something on a web page, allow it to be spidered, and even  
> if your domain goes off line forever, that page will still exist in  
> places around the web. Provide an RSS feed and the words will get  
> stored somewhere. Post to Usenet or a mailing list run by the majors  
> and your post will stick around. With pretty much anything on the  
> intarwebs it's almost impossible to delete it completely.
>
> As it is with html, RSS and nntp, so it is with rdf. Except that the  
> granularity is smaller. An individual triple can start in one place,  
> be smushed repeatedly and end up in places you really weren't  
> expecting. Once you let them out of the box, triples take on a life  
> of their own.

Yes the triples do, but does the trust in them continue to grow as  
they are meshed up, or does it in fact diminish?
There is a game we played when we were children of telling something  
to someone, who then tells that sentence to their neighbor, who tells  
it to their neighbor. At some point one asks the last person what the  
intial sentence was, and it is often oddly different from the intial  
one.

You may pulbish something on the web. But it may be wrong. You may  
publish a contradiction on the web. What then? Is everything then  
immediately meaningless? (It would be in a strictly mathematical  
version of first order logic) We are not dealing with logic here  
though, but with technology and biological evolving systems. We are  
speaking of copies. Memes. Language is a Virus.

http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/language_is_a_virus

Henry

>
>
> So. Once upon a time it seemed like a good idea to have wildcard DNS  
> on a domain with some FOAF. The FOAF got spidered on multiple  
> domains, laptop.domain.com, w.domain.com, www.domain.com,  
> foo.domain.com. The apparent assertions multiplied and were  
> republished. No matter that most of that returns 404 now, the  
> assertions won't go away.
>
> Take the recent Tribes.net debacle. They produce no FOAF now. Any  
> triples that came from Tribes.net are now obsolete. How long do you  
> think it will be before references to them disappear?
>
> -- 
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