- From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 16:11:46 -0000
- To: "Bill dehOra" <BdehOra@interx.com>, "'Dan Brickley'" <danbri@w3.org>, "McBride, Brian" <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>, <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
> Suppose we wanted to do this for real. 'Fred' is not a URI. *sigh* This is the age-old problem where we want to make assertions abotut things that don't have URIs in RDF. My take on this is that you simply *give* them a URI:- @prefix : <#> :bill :loves :jane Now you don't need to explicitly have a URI "<#bill>" for <#bill> to exist: you just talk about it, and call it a person as best you can:- @prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/0.1/foaf/#> :bill a <http://xmlns.com/0.6/wordnet/person> :bill me:name "Bill" :bill foaf:mbox <mailto:bill@bill.com> If Bill digitally signed this, it would make all the difference, but it's not perfect: the simple fact is that if something doesn't have a URI, you can't write about it. Do not start writing things about string literals, because it doesn't mean anything: write about URIs, please :-) We're going to have to accept the fact sooner or later that until digital signatures come along, RDF is going to be very limited in its scope. At least we can still say things like the following to some degree of confidence:- @prefix dc: <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/> <> dc:author <mailto:sean@mysterylights.com> But even then, can you be sure I'm really writing this? -- Kindest Regards, Sean B. Palmer @prefix : <http://infomesh.net/2001/01/n3terms/#> . [ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] has :homepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .
Received on Thursday, 18 January 2001 11:13:10 UTC