RE: Obsoleting URIs [was: URIs and Unique IDs]

> From:  Pierre-Antoine Champin
>
> http://www.w3.org/2006/link#obsoletes does indeed raise problems:
> according to its comment, "[The terms] are synonymous, but subject is
> preferred to the object. Logically similar to owl:sameAs, but not
> symmetric."
>
> I'm not sure what "logically similar" implies, but if the terms are
> synonymous, then
>   :a link:obsoletes :b .
> should imply
>   :b link:obsoletes :a .
> which makes link:obsoletes defacto symetrical.
>
> In fact, links:obsoletes obviously applies to *the URI* of
> the resource rather than the resource itself, so David's second proposal
> sounds more appropriate. Unfortunately, it is not valid RDF...

Yes, if there were one simple thing I could change about the RDF specification it would be to remove that silly prohibition against having a literal as the subject of an assertion.

>
> A possible solution seems to rather use subproperties of
> http://www.w3.org/2006/link#uri , e.g. :obsoleteUri and :preferedUri,
> all ranging to xsd:anyURI .

I like the idea of :obsoleteUri, presumably to be used like this:

     <http://example/new-term>
         :obsoleteUri "http://example/old-term"^^xsd:anyURI .

which would mean the exact same thing as:

     <http://example/old-term>
         :obsoleteUri "http://example/old-term"^^xsd:anyURI .

because <http://example/old-term> owl:sameAs <http://example/new-term> .  The semantics would be clean.

However, I do not think :preferredUri would work very well, because it seems non-monotonic: the URI that is preferred today may not be the URI that is preferred tomorrow.


David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
+1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
http://www.hp.com/go/software

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Received on Wednesday, 5 November 2008 20:26:02 UTC