Re: what is this? was: Re: now://example.org/car

Miles Sabin wrote:

>
> Jonathan Borden wrote,
> > http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1772811392
> >
> > is this a web page or a car or an auction for a car?
>
> Any of the above, assuming the appropriate context.
>
> In *this* context it's probably the URI of an "example" ;-)
>

Exactly. In RDF we might say (in different contexts)

<http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1772811392> a :web-page
.
<http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1772811392> a :auction .
<http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1772811392> a :car .

and in OWL we can say that things which are web-pages are not cars:

:car owl:disjointWith :web-page .

so an OWL reasoner can detect when a certain term is being used "out of
context" as it were. At some point in the future we might teach machines to
reason using different contexts but for the moment, we must assume a
specific context and draw conclusions.

Jonathan