Re: does RDF require understanding all 82 URI schemes?

Martin Duerst writes:

 > The answer to this was obvious to me two seconds after reading
 > through your complaints. And then in the next mail showed that
 > it already exists:
 > 
 >  > <#x>
 >  >   daml:equivalentTo
 >  >   http://www.megginson.com/battles.rdf#jutland
 > 
 > I think you have quite some important experience that we all can
 > learn from, but please don't blow it with such 'problems' than
 > can be solved in a few seconds.

I already answered this one privately -- this solution won't scale,
because it requires you to retrieve a resource to find the aliased
identifier.  If you're dealing with more than a few objects, you'll
end up with an exponential explosion of network access.  That's not to
say that an equivalent-to property isn't a good idea; only that it's
not a practical alternative to sharing the same identifier.

 > Do they need that? Maybe not. In everyday language, we never
 > use social security numbers. The identity of the objects we speak
 > about is part of the web of language, not outside of it.

The more things you need to talk about, the greater the effort
required to identify them.  You probably know fewer than 500 people
personally, and for many of them, first name, or first name + context
is likely sufficient -- it's probably fairly rarely that you need to
use even a last name referring to one person you know in a discussion
with a mutual acquaintance.

 > >I've written a couple of big chunks of it, and I'm afraid it's neither
 > >robust nor interoperable, though I've done my best.  The inability to
 > >round-trip a Namespace URI is the killer.
 > 
 > Can you be more specific? What do you mean with 'round-trip'?

You cannot reliably reconstruct the input Namespace from the RDF
property URI to re-serialize the RDF data.  See the (many) other
messages in this thread for details.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

Received on Monday, 12 February 2001 20:51:04 UTC