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The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF

The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF
The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF
The most popular visualization of RDF - the underlying language to represent the Semantic Web – is a Great Big Graph (GBG) or Big Fat Graph (BFG) if one prefers. By graph, we mean representations with nodes and edges to model the relationships within the space represented. Why are they the default representation? The answer that is usually proffered is that the Semantic Web is a Graph, ipso facto we use graphs to represent it. This notion that data should be presented to the user as it is represented in the computer is what we propose as the pathetic fallacy of RDF. In the following discussion, we consider examples of the pathetic fallacy in terms of the interaction challenge of * what knowledge these graphs communicate, * what tasks they support, and * whether these are the optimal paradigms for these representations/tasks. From this context, we investigate the question, are graphs the main default representation for the Semantic Web and if not, how might we think about formalized representations for the Semantic Web in order to make accessible the promised benefits of the Semantic Web for knowledge building.
rdf, visualization, usability, semantic web, mspace, haystack
schraefel, m.c.
ac304659-1692-47f6-b892-15113b8c929f
Karger, David
7ecc1fdb-fc2f-41fe-87a3-55f7f4ec81ce
schraefel, m.c.
ac304659-1692-47f6-b892-15113b8c929f
Karger, David
7ecc1fdb-fc2f-41fe-87a3-55f7f4ec81ce

schraefel, m.c. and Karger, David (2006) The Pathetic Fallacy of RDF. International Workshop on the Semantic Web and User Interaction (SWUI) 2006, Athens, Georgia.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

The most popular visualization of RDF - the underlying language to represent the Semantic Web – is a Great Big Graph (GBG) or Big Fat Graph (BFG) if one prefers. By graph, we mean representations with nodes and edges to model the relationships within the space represented. Why are they the default representation? The answer that is usually proffered is that the Semantic Web is a Graph, ipso facto we use graphs to represent it. This notion that data should be presented to the user as it is represented in the computer is what we propose as the pathetic fallacy of RDF. In the following discussion, we consider examples of the pathetic fallacy in terms of the interaction challenge of * what knowledge these graphs communicate, * what tasks they support, and * whether these are the optimal paradigms for these representations/tasks. From this context, we investigate the question, are graphs the main default representation for the Semantic Web and if not, how might we think about formalized representations for the Semantic Web in order to make accessible the promised benefits of the Semantic Web for knowledge building.

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More information

Published date: 2006
Additional Information: Event Dates: Nov 2007
Venue - Dates: International Workshop on the Semantic Web and User Interaction (SWUI) 2006, Athens, Georgia, 2007-11-01
Keywords: rdf, visualization, usability, semantic web, mspace, haystack
Organisations: Agents, Interactions & Complexity

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 262911
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/262911
PURE UUID: 1e1c8b09-1439-4847-b5ea-d18d023290a9
ORCID for m.c. schraefel: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-9061-7957

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 17 Aug 2006
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:16

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Contributors

Author: m.c. schraefel ORCID iD
Author: David Karger

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