RE: HTTP URIs for real world objects

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 13:50 +0100, Peter F Brown wrote:
> Just to clarify a couple of points:
> - when I refer to the use/mention issue it is in the sense of
> understanding that www.example.com/psi/apple can be "used" as being
> the thing pointed to (that URI might dereference, for example, to a
> string of data that, for the owner of the domain, is to be used as
> being the thing named); or it can be "mentioned" as something that is
> a marker or token, standing as a proxy for the thing, elsewhere in
> addressable network space or not; My issue today is that there is no
> mechanism in the RDF standard to tell me if you intend it stand for
> the formal or the latter case. Topic Map PSId's do.

I may not be understanding the subtleties of the issue but I think there
may be a way to express the difference between use and mention in RDF.

In turtle I would write <www.example.com/psi/apple> to refer to the
resource identified by that URI - I think this is equivalent to "use" of
the URI.

If I just wanted to "mention" the URI I would write
"www.example.com/psi/apple"^^xsd:URI

Ian