- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2010 09:00:00 -0500
- To: Jiří Procházka <ojirio@gmail.com>
- Cc: nathan@webr3.org, public-lod@w3.org
On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 07:23 +0100, Jiří Procházka wrote: [ . . . ] > I think it is flawed trying to enforce "URI == 1 thing" Exactly right. The "URI == 1 thing" notion is myth #1 in "Resource Identity and Semantic Extensions: Making Sense of Ambiguity": http://dbooth.org/2010/ambiguity/paper.html#myth1 It is a good *goal*, but it is inherently unachievable. > by some > system (especially if you want to maintain RDF as one of supported > structured data formats (I dare to say the major one)), as nothing can > be completely unambiguous (in RDF) - that is something the publisher > needs to keep in mind and work towards to. Right. And believe it or not, the RDF Semantics *already* accounts for this inherent ambiguity by noting that an RDF graph will normally have multiple interpretations. (An "interpretation" of a graph in RDF semantics is a mapping from its URIs to resources.) To quote from the RDF Semantics: http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/#interp [[ Notice that there is no presumption here that any assertion contains enough information to specify a single unique interpretation. It is usually impossible to assert enough in any language to completely constrain the interpretations to a single possible world, so there is no such thing as 'the' unique interpretation of an RDF graph. ]] For a fairly clear explanation of how this works, see "Resource Identity and Semantic Extensions: Making Sense of Ambiguity": http://dbooth.org/2010/ambiguity/paper.html The important thing to keep in mind is that ambiguity is *relative* -- it depends on the application. An application that does not need to differentiate the toucan from its web page will still produce correct answers even if it uses a URI the ambiguously denotes both. However, another application that needs to associate a different :hasOwner property value with the toucan than the web page will need to use a different URI for each. -- David Booth, Ph.D. Cleveland Clinic (contractor) http://dbooth.org/ Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.
Received on Thursday, 11 November 2010 14:00:29 UTC