Re: [Linking-open-data] watchdog.net and LOD best practices

On 17/04/2008, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
> Tom Heath wrote:
>
> > Ed,
> >
> > Thanks for asking the question - it's a good one, and I'd also be keen
> > to hear the background to this decision from Aaron. As you flag up in
> > your response re the use of #this, the issue here is much more about
> > distinguishing Districts from "Documents about Districts" than it is
> > about slashes or hashes.
> >
> > Tom.
> >
> >
> >
>  Tom,
>
>  Yes.
>
>  I see Peter is here :-) I've been trying to drive home this issue of
> Identity and Address separation. The URI <> URL unless he "Thing" in
> question is an information resource, and only then is appropriate to take
> the URI/URL approach.
>
>  A Web of Data is a Web of Data Objects. The Document Web is a Web of
> Documents.  In either case you must uniquely identify the Objects :-)

Documents are representations of data objects, and hence I think each
data object may have different representations which may all be
documents with no hassle (as long as you can derive a URI for each
representation given your current document). Documents shouldn't be
second class citizens in the semantic web IMO.

>  #this is just a cheap mechanism for making a URI from a URL without the
> cost of a 303 .

You are the first person I have heard who has suggested that I am able
to create a URI from a URL by changing it... By definition all URL's
are URI's

>  We have to do a better job of explaining what Object Identity is about in
> the context of the Linekd Data Web, especially as this is an area of
> computer science that predates the Web.

I am hoping to generate some discussion that does the opposite to
that, ie. it moves away from computer science into a solely URI based
system where you can retrieve information just using a URI, as the web
has so successfully done so far! I agree that you must be able to
uniquely identify objects.

I don't see the use of document fragment identifiers as being suitable
for getting past the Content Negotiation derived ambiguity barrier
though. As you say, every URI should be unique. You can do this and
keep interoperability with the URI scheme for linked data if you give
each representation a different URI which you can then state in an RDF
triple for how to retrieve a given representation using a URI. I
disagree with a notion that URI's should be distinct however, that is
what owl:sameAs was created to enable, a set of URI's which describe
the same thing.

Peter

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 22:52:38 UTC