Re: [pedantic-web] Re: The OWL Ontology URI

On Thu, 2010-05-13 at 10:33 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
[ . . . ]
> But it seems to me that 
> 
>  "Other things, such as cars and dogs... are not information resources."
> 
> is sufficiently precise that reading it as
> 
>  sumo:Dog owl:disjointFrom w:InformationResource.
> 
> is trivial.

I certainly agree that that was the intent of the above sentence.  But I
am saying: (1) without a formal definition of w:InformationResource we
are wasting our time trying to divine its boundaries, such as trying to
decide whether it is also disjoint with foo:RdfGraph; and (2) there is
no architectural *need* for the AWWW to define w:InformationResource to
have *any* such disjointness constraints.  

I think the AWWW would have been better off phrasing the sentence about
"cars and dogs" as guidance that one probably *should* not model things
like cars and dogs as information resources, because doing so is likely
to cause name collisions when one tries to use the same URI to speak
separately about the dog and the web page that describes the dog, rather
than saying that cars and dogs *are* not information resources.

> 
> [...]
> > I know of no other reasonable and general way to define the identity of
> > a resource than by specifying a set of assertions that constrain it.
> 
> For general engineering purposes, that's my sense too.
> 
> But on a tangentially related, philosophical note, I found this
> somewhat eye-opening:
> 
>  Can You Prove Two Particles Are Identical?
> 
>  Eliezer_Yudkowsky
>  14 April 2008
>  http://lesswrong.com/lw/ph/can_you_prove_two_particles_are_identical/


Great blog post!  To give an example of how two URIs U1 and U2 can be
known to *always* denote the same thing, this would be guaranteed if the
URI declarations of U1 and U2 *both* stated:

  <U1> owl:sameAs <U2> .

Intuitively it also seems like U1 and U2 would have to always denote the
same resource if their URI declarations were isomorphic, differing only
in substituting U1 for U2, for example, though I'm not sure how to
express this rigorously.



-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
Cleveland Clinic (contractor)

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.

Received on Friday, 14 May 2010 03:00:12 UTC