RE: URIs

Alan,

> > URI http://www.example.com/gene;
> >
> > You need to dereference the "gene" variable in order to 
> understand it 
> > and do something meaningful about it.
> 
> That's one way. You can also publish a paper that describes 
> it, get a bunch of people agree to use it the same way, 
> supply formal logical definitions, or a subset of them in OWL.

The objective of semantic web is designed for use by machine for automated
processing of information.  Once it touches the social aspect, it is beyond
what the RDF's capability, don't you think?

The same analogy is the question regarding why we need to port controlled
vocabulary into RDF/OWL. Because in the formal form, the semantic is encoded
by a string of natural language, whereas the latter is by a machine
language.

> > Answer to (1a), Of course, you can have "variables" that are not 
> > intended to be dereferenced, in Java script, the type 
> "undefined" is 
> > similar to a "404".
> > (Please note, a 404 does not mean that the URI does not 
> exist, it just 
> > implies that at current time, it cannot be dereferenced.) It is not 
> > wrong to define an "undefined" variable, it is just not much use of 
> > it.
> > (1b) URI is just the name that refers a location on the 
> WEB, so it of 
> > course is a name.
> 
> It is a names that *sometimes* refers to the web. See my 
> quote from the RFC.

Yes, of course.  There are two basic types of information in the web.  The
information-resource (IR) and non-IR.  For the former, the entitiy's
manifestation can not be retrieved through dereference the URI.  For
instance, a web page, a pdf document, an RDF document etc.  For the non-IR,
like me the person, dereference the URI would not give you "me the person".
But instead, I shall offer a description about myself at the URI that
represents me via a 303 redirect. 
 
> W3C knows nothing about Biology. They are good for defining  
> standards, but won't help us avoid one person using a gene database  
> entry identifier to refer to a protein in one place and a swissprot  
> name to refer to what they mean to be the same protein in another  
> place. That's what we have to work out.

Of course, W3C won't mandate what should be a URI.  But I don't think there
should be a "standard" to say if a URI represents a biological entity, it
should be a datebase entry or not.  You can achieve this through clear
description of URI. For instance, if I declar a URI to represent a protein
"foo". You can say

http://www.example.com/foo a someontology:Protein .
http://www.example.com/foo http://www.example.com/dbentry (some URI to
access a dabase) .

This is semantic clear, right?  Why do we need to design a guideline to
"implicitly" make

http://www.example.com/foo to refer to represent certain types of entity.  I
think one of the important key to RDF is its explicitness.  If you adds a
lot of social guidelines to the RDF, the whole point of SW will be lost.

Xiaoshu

Received on Monday, 19 June 2006 16:36:16 UTC