RE: ISSUE-148: RDF Concepts - IRIs do *not* always denote the same resource

On Saturday, December 14, 2013 5:27 PM, David Booth wrote:
> On 12/14/2013 07:04 AM, Markus Lanthaler wrote:
> > What if we would spell out some consequences of IRIs that denote
> > multiple things. Something like
> >
> >   1.3 The Referent of an IRI
> >
> >   [...]
> >
> >   Guidelines for determining the referent of an IRI are provided in other
> >   documents, like Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One [WEBARCH]
> >   and Cool URIs for the Semantic Web [COOLURIS]. A very brief, informal and
> >   partial account follows:
> >
> >   • IRIs have global scope by design. Thus, two different appearances
> >     of an IRI denote the same resource. Violations of this principle may
> >     lead to interoperability problems or inconsistencies when, e.g.,
> >     using data from multiple sources.
> >
> > Would that address your concerns?
> 
> That comes *very* close to addressing my concerns.

Great!


> A slight tweak to the bullet item would do it:
> 
>     • IRIs have global scope by design. Thus, two different appearances
>       of an IRI are intended to denote the same resource. Violations
>       of this principle may lead to interoperability problems or
>       inconsistencies when, e.g., using data from multiple sources.

IMO this "are intended to" blurs the line between an architectural constraint (that, admittedly, is sometimes violated in practice) and a nice to have or best practice a bit too much and thus might confuse readers. This is an important aspect not only of RDF but the Web in general.

I think I understand where you are coming from and for people with a strong Semantic Web background and/or logics your variation might be more accurate (depending on how you look at it). I just doubt that those people will even read this introductory part of the document or, if they do so,  be confused by the statement I've proposed. On the other hand, a lot of problems can be avoided if it's made clear to newcomers that every resource/entity/thing needs a separate IRI or, in other words, even if the IRI is used in two different place (e.g. files), it denotes the same thing.

I would thus really prefer the stronger statement. Is there any chance you could live with it?


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Saturday, 14 December 2013 18:23:52 UTC