RE: Explicit Disambiguation Via RDF bNodes, more Process

> same way - look at the number of the ways people on this list have
found
> to use identifiers, references and so on. To expect an essentially

I don't think that the people on this list are representative.  The
people on this list enjoy intellectual debate, and are deliberately
trying to come up with various alternatives.  That's successful
brainstorming and opinionated discourse; it doesn't prove a crisis in
the status of URIs as identifiers.

> rigid mapping to last without breaking in an environment with
potentially
> millions (billions?) of users seems to me to be optimistic, to say the
> least. If you can give me one example in the history of humanity where
> such a thing has remained constant, then I'll concede the point.

This is a poor argument.  Words mean things.  Just because there are
rare cases where a word will be used with connotation that is opposite
its normal connotation does not mean that words are meaningless.  Are
words "too far gone"?

I don't have to prove that ambiguity never existed to assert that
gratuitous ambiguity is a stupid strategy.

> doesn't help. They each have a role in different problem-solving 
> scenarios : the first is critical to most forms of communication, the 

There is only one very simple problem being solved here.  If I want to
allow millions of people to independently share their assertions and
know that they are talking about the same "thing", how do I identify a
"thing".

> look at the reality of the URI rather than trying to change it or
invent a

Yes.  The reality is that URIs which use http: refer to something that
uses HTTP -- a web page.

> magic "UTI" to replace it (apart from locally - no problem with UTIs
> there).

But locality is the opposite of the semantic web, so I guess this is
off-topic.  And the idea of a "local universal identifier" sounds pretty
fishy.

> I think viewing the URI as a set and using context within inference is
> probably the best pragmatic solution.

I have no idea what you are talking about.  Do you have an example of
how to solve the simple problem I pointed out?

Received on Friday, 26 April 2002 17:55:48 UTC