Re: What if an URI also is a URL

Oskar Welzl wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 30.08.2007, 11:12 +0100 schrieb Xiaoshu Wang:
>   
>> Oskar Welzl wrote:
>>     
>>> Pity, though, that there hardly seems to be an agreement on how to
>>> handle this issue, so simply by choosing the above URI myself I will not
>>> prevent *others* making statements like 
>>> <#thismail> mail:sender <http://oskar.twoday.net>
>>> when they refer to an update-notification they received from the weblog.
>>>   
>>>       
>> Personally, I don't think it is a pity.  Rather I think it is good in 
>> that way.  WebArch should not enforce what people can or cannot say.  
>> But as person, we can choose what we agree and what we don't.  In the 
>> web, we agree by sharing, by importing your statements.  So, what is 
>> true (or in the sense of popular belief) are shared by a large 
>> community.  What is not true (or not popular) is left to "die" or 
>> continue live in isolate. What we need to educate ourselves and others 
>> are how to best convey our meaning clearly so that we won't be left alone.
>>     
>
> Sure, that's how it works in practise.
>
> But because of the ambiguity of URIs (which, in fact, is an 1:n relation
> URI:information resources), the "network effect" doesn't kick in as
> easily as one would expect. If best practise guidelines where strict
> enough or even existent, people might use a certain URI consistently
> across the web. Statements could easily be collected to add information
> about the resource. On the other hand, if I made a statement, I could be
> sure it's well understood by others.
>
> The way it is, even though I can collect as much statements about a URI
> as I find, I'd better not mix statements from independent sources all to
> carelessly: The might apply to completely different information
> resources and leave me with unexpected results. Vice versa, I have to
> expect my own statements get misinterpreted.
>   
No, in RDF there as n:1 relation from URIs to Resources, you may have
different names for the same resources but URIs unambiguously refer to a
particular resource.  Since the classes foaf:Agent and a foaf:Document
are disjoint, the following two graphs

<urn:foo> <foaf:mbox> <mailto:foo@example.org>.

and

[ <foaf:homepage> <urn:foo>]

do not make different usage of the URI "urn:foo", they contradict each
other and at least one of the two graphs is wrong.

But talking about standards, why is this discussion on a list which has
been replaced by semantic-web@w3.org?

reto

-- 
Reto Bachmann-Gmür
Talis Information Limited

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Received on Thursday, 30 August 2007 20:28:13 UTC