Re: What a URI means, was Re: erratum Re: resources and URIs

At 15:32 27/07/03 -0500, pat hayes wrote:
>>Claiming that the URI cannot
>>identify both the conceptual mapping and the real thing outside
>>the information system is equivalent to claiming that your
>>social security number cannot be used to identify anything other
>>than your social security account.
>
>OK, point taken: so the URI can be ambiguous. I agree names can be 
>ambiguous in this sense; they can have more than one possible 
>meaning/referent. ...

Is this really true?  If a social security number "identifies" a social 
security account (and nothing else), it can still be used to make reference 
to a person in a clause of the form "the person whose social security 
account is identified by social security number xxxx".   This doesn't seem 
like ambiguity to me, but a flexibility of language to express related ideas.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>
PGP: 0FAA 69FF C083 000B A2E9  A131 01B9 1C7A DBCA CB5E