Re: Resource identity of GETable URIs [Was Re: the mistake I made! ]

On Fri, 2011-03-04 at 15:45 -0500, Jonathan Rees wrote:
> The 'identity' idea is a red herring - which is good because I really
> don't know what it means.

To help clarify, when I talk about the "resource identity" of a URI I'm
talking about the set of assertions that should be used in any graph
that uses that URI.  In the case of IRs, these would be assertions along
the lines of what you referred to as "(c) an appropriate RDF axiom set
derived from the above axioms" in
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/awwsw/ir-axioms/20110225

> 
> The only practical reason to pursue httpRange-14 is the desire to
> write metadata, and the only logic or philosophy that we need is
> whatever is absolutely required to enable the production and
> consumption of meaningful metadata.

Agreed.

> 
> To this end I agree with David that toucan-document chimeras are not
> necessarily so bad. But they would be awful if toucan axioms forced
> two such chimeras to be identified that shouldn't be. For example,
> suppose toucans had unique names "Fred" "George" and so on (i.e.
> toucan-name is a functional property), and toucan-chimera 1 had
> toucan-name "Fred" and toucan-chimera 2 also had toucan-name "Fred".
> If that caused me to conflate chimeras with distinct document-natures
> that would be very bad - my graph would contain incorrect information.

Right.  But that only needs to hold in *your* graph.  Someone else's
graph may harmlessly conflate them.

> 
> Making IR and toucan disjoint might help, but a disjointness axiom is
> neither sufficient (as in the CC REL case) nor necessary.

Agreed.

> 
> I don't think the bad situation is likely since (according to my
> conjecture based mostly on reading between the lines) the people who
> create toucan-document chimeras are the same as the ones who wouldn't
> assert that their properties are functional.
> 
> If I care about the documents and am lucky, I'll be in ignorance of
> toucan axiomatics and I'll be blissfully unaware of the equation - I
> probably won't even trust the functional property axiom source in the
> first place. But it would be nice not to leave this to chance. One
> possible solution: Tell people to feel free to create toucan-chimeras,
> but if you do, please don't use logic at the same time, just do linked
> data.

I think it's a matter of people getting used to the idea that resource
identity is not universal.  It may -- and should -- be universally
*constrained*, but it cannot be universally uniquely determined.  It
will always depend on the graph under consideration, i.e., on the
application.

-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Friday, 4 March 2011 21:56:07 UTC