- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2003 13:52:40 -0700
- To: <uri@w3c.org>
- Cc: "Pat Hayes" <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
Personally, I think the problem of grounding assertions in the real world is a Hard Problem, and that those who've been working on RDF or Semantic Web have tried to avoid this problem by wishful thinking that the "URI" could somehow be used as a universal semantic concept designator and that it would do the heavy lifting all by itself. I just don't think it works, and no amount of wordsmithing in RFC 2396bis will actually help much. I'm all for the URI specification explicitly disclaiming this responsibility. For a proposed specific wording: > What is a Resource? Can a URI be used to identify a Concept? > This specification does not define the word 'resource' carefully, > nor does it define how a URI can be used to 'Identify' a > 'Resource' with enough precision to allow URIs to be used > as grounded terms in any kind of logic language. First, > note that the _semantics_ of a URI are not defined in > this specification. Each URI scheme itself defines the > relationship between URIs of that scheme and the resources > they identify. In all known cases, that definition isn't > enough to allow the URIs of that scheme to be used, by > themselves, as unambiguous identifiers when trying to > make logical assertions.
Received on Friday, 25 April 2003 16:52:51 UTC