- From: Simon Spero <ses@unc.edu>
- Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:38:36 -0500
- To: Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>
- Cc: "Sandhaus, Evan" <sandhes@nytimes.com>, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>, SKOS <public-esw-thes@w3.org>, Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
- Message-ID: <1af06bde0911131038r17f2b509kb9b85743c08d86f9@mail.gmail.com>
On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>wrote: I suggest you read or re-read "In Defense of Ambiguity" > http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/irw2006/presentations/HayesSlides.pdf > Actually, what you ask for, as well as Richard does, is the right to > overload (pun) URIs like you do it for names in natural languages. Following > Pat's thesis, you could indeed use the same URI to identify a library index > entry (skos:Concept) and its referent (person, country, whatever), providing > you have mechanisms allowing to sort out predicates relevant to each > interpretation of the URI. > I agree that identical sequences of characters can refer to different entities or classes of entities, and that "natural language" terms can be ambiguous (per Quine). In Controlled Vocabularies, the labels for homonyms and polysemes must be distinct, and their scope of usage defined, subject to the limit of the indeterminacy of translation. However, since URIs are artificially coined,and subject to the control of a single "legal person", there is a choice as to whether to use the same sequence of characters to refer to multiple, distinct entities. If one deliberately choses to use the same name for entities which one considers to be distinct, one must take equally deliberate care to disambiguate uses of that name, possibly restricting uses of the name solely to cases where the entity referenced can be disambiguated. Since URIs are used in RDF as "subjects", unless an assertion could only refer to one entity and not the other, or must apply to all possible entities that the URI could denote, it is not possible to perform this disambiguation. URIs are cheap; why not have two? Simon p.s. Since it's Gavagi Friday, here's a story about detached rabbit parts<http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/09/science-monday-vat-grown-rabbi>. In a vat. Capable of giving mild sexual gratification to a warehouse full of rabbits. Lo, a trifecta!
Received on Friday, 13 November 2009 18:39:16 UTC