RE: Disambiguation; keeping the "U" in "URI"

 
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@microsoft.com] 
>
> >   2. Don't trust URIs to refer to distinct entities
> 
> All this is suggesting is that we stop using URIs to identify 
> things.  So I guess we should come up with a different scheme 
> for coming up with identifiers for things.  Maybe we will 
> call it Universal Thing Identifiers, or UTI.

That doesn't follow. You're going to have this problem with any
naming scheme.


> I think it is not so much RDF that suffers, since it also 
> eliminates usefulness of N3, bare naked triples, or any other 
> semantic information.  Essentially #2 defeats the purpose of
> *URIs*.  

Not at all. You just can't make the assumption in an open system
that a URI is always being used to refer to the same resource
across the system. Ambiguity is going to be a part of a system
where anyone can say anything about anything. URIs are very useful,
but care needs to be taken when merging data where URIs are used as
names.


>>
No, we can't stop people from asserting that a web page is a car,
but that doesn't mean that we have to jump through hoops to
accommodate those people or worry about having to interop with them
later. 
>>

Yes, let's impose order on those people...or maybe they'll impose
order on us. Anyway you do realize that eventually cars will have
IP addresses and very possibly URIs?

Bill de hÓra

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