RE: Namespaces wihtout "#" Was: Few CWM Bugs

I've been following this thread for a while now trying to consider how
and if this is related to TopicMaps and indeed whether that can help in
understanding what we are trying to express.

My perception of the issue was not necessarily to do with topic
occurrences but is related to one of the issues that TopicMaps solves
very well. This is the distinction between identities that serve as
identities for 'resolvable resources', using what ever resolution
function you choose, and identities that are 'just' identities for some
concept or thing. 

As Tim pointed out, a person is not a web page but a web page is a
resolvable resource with identiity and thus it would be useful if this
was somehow indicated. TopicMaps allows Topics/ Resources to have 2 main
forms of identity (ignore the topic naming constraint) - the
SubjectIndicatorReference and the ResourceReference. Both are intended
to be unique identities but the resource reference also indicates to us
that this Topic/ Resource is in fact resolvable to some electronic
artifact.

If this is an issue in RDF then solutions can be seen as either needing
to be fundamental - i.e. RDF has two kinds of resources (resolvable and
unresolvable) or annotational, there is some agreed property that
indicates this resource is resolvable. 

I hope I have got the essence of the discussion and haven't commented
inappropriately.

kind regards,

graham

Graham Moore
VP R&D empolis GmbH
Editor XTM 1.0 - http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm
gdm@empolis.com 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Crowther [mailto:peter.crowther@networkinference.com]
> Sent: 28 November 2001 09:06
> To: 'Tim Berners-Lee'; www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Namespaces wihtout "#" Was: Few CWM Bugs
> 
> 
> > From: Tim Berners-Lee [mailto:timbl@w3.org]
> [...]
> > By all means say {<http://robustai.net/~seth/index.htm> is 
> > con:homePage of [ con:nickName "Seth"; a con:Person]
> > 
> > But don't say    <> a :Person, because 
> > <http://robustai.net/~seth/index.htm>
> > is a web page and web pages are not people.
> [...]
> 
> This is suddenly starting to look much more like the 
> topic/occurrence split
> in topic maps, but without the clear definition of a topic.  Now we've
> introduced a separate concept of (if I've read it right) an 
> anonymous node
> of class con:Person and with nickname "Seth".
> 
> Would current model theories deal appropriately with this if another
> fragment of RDF made an assertion about a different anonymous 
> node of class
> con:Person and with nickname "Seth"?  And what is 
> 'appropriately' here?
> Should those two nodes be merged, on the assumption that they 
> are somehow
> referring to the same thing, or kept separate?
> 
> 		- Peter
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 28 November 2001 06:22:14 UTC