Re: names, URIs and ontologies

Hello,

I'm not sure I get your point :
URIs are actually intended to be public names :
URLs are public names for pieces of data/online services,
URIs are an extension of URLs, supposedly extensible so that the same syntax can express any kind of URI.

The ideal URI for boston would be
  city:/USA/Massachusets/Boston
It assumes that the "city:" scheme is commonly agreed on,
but any kind of public name has to do that agreement assumption.

It may look cumbersome to write such a long name for Boston, and I agree with Pat Hayes that a web logic could accept ambiguities, as natural language does. So I guess that the following ambiguous URIs could be used too :
  city:Boston -- ambiguous with Boston (UK)
or even
  named:Boston -- ambiguous with Boston (UK) and Ralh Boston (olympic champion, 1939-)

The URIs abo

The problem you raise doesn't come, IMO, from URIs themselves -- it is easy to imagine new kinds of URIs -- but from the fact that URI schemes do not exist yet to describe cities or persons, and that web logics need them already.

  Pierre-Antoine