RE: Blank nodes for concepts.

Right.


I think that "identify by description" is probably more important than we
realise. After all, the only way that I can tell anyone what my concept means
is by description.

If I have a restricted use case, and a reasonably consistent community, and
some examples, I can identify my concept sufficiently for it to be useful as
a name, instead of by description. For many use cases, this is the fast way
to work. But to learn the vocabulary, to check something where people aren't
sure, to compare two vocablaries for merging them, or to develop vocabularies
"organically".

I suspect this is a smaller use case, but one where the ability to play
around with things before pinning them down is helpful.

In my experience (hundreds of foaf records, not the millions that are out
there) FOAF records tend to remain anonymous and be compared by description
most of the time. This is slightly different because people's names are not
that stable and are not consistent (I am probably an extreme case - I have at
least 5 names listed in FOAF files, and I actually use several more). But
this has been important in being able to work out whether "two people" are
really the same or not.

Cheers

Chaals

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Cayzer, Steve wrote:

>
>> I don't see why something as well as a URI is necessary.
>Yup, that's the crux of it.
>If we insist on the use of URIs for unambiguous identification, the problem
>goes away.
>
>It depends how useful/essential an 'identify by description' capability is.
>The experience of the foaf project might help us answer that?
>
>Steve

Received on Monday, 9 February 2004 04:39:09 UTC