Re: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys

That's a very good explanation of why this is a problem for the Semantic 
Web.

However, as I understand the counter-arguments, URIs identify resources, 
not the representations that they might send from time to time. That's 
how the Web works. This doesn't mean there isn't a close relationship 
between the resources and the references (roughly, the representation is 
what the URI identifies in the context of being dereferenced), but the 
fact that the Semantic Web gets a headache about this isn't a valid 
reason to limit the identifying power of the rest of the Web.

Is it as simple as saying that *in RDF*, http URIs identify documents, 
without saying what they identify on the larger Web?
*shrug*


On Monday, April 22, 2002, at 02:32  PM, Joshua Allen wrote:

>> But there are problems. In the Evaluation And Report Language [1],
>> we're basically quite stumped as to what things are being evaluated.
>> For example, we might have the following Webpage that talks about a
>
> This is an awesome explanation of why we care about how people choose to
> use http: identifiers.  The semantic web is about interoperable
> metadata.  If the metadata can't flow, aggregate, and interoperate, it's
> *not* going to be a semantic web.  Interoperability means that if I
> aggregate 500 different assertions from different sources, all about
> http://www.microsoft.com, I know that they all are talking about the
> same "thing".  If I can't even guarantee that much, then all of this
> semantic web talk is a waste of time.  I hope people can see from Sean's
> example why this is such a fundamental thing to get out of the way.
>
>
--
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/