Re: owl:sameAs - Is it used in a right way?

Kingsley,
 I think you raise good points. I also nominally speak of entities, their
attributes and the relations that hold between them. But I think your
diagram is somewhat misleading. URIs do denote (can stand in the place of)
entities of interest in order to refer to and/or describe them. If you
separate the identifier from what it intends to identify, then you'll need
another identifier for the object of interest (and recurse). Hence, a
information containing object (document, graph, file, etc) may refer to our
entity of interest by some label. the document could refer to it in some
statement, or may contain elaborate descriptions about it.  But in no way
does a document directly refer to a real world object (in does so
indirectly through some token - an english name, identifier or uri, etc).

m.




On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>wrote:

>  On 3/20/13 10:58 PM, David Booth wrote:
>
>
> Thus, to be very clear, under the existing RDF Semantics specification, a
> given URI does **not** necessarily map to only one resource.
>
>
> True, but I don't think the statement above always provides the clarity
> intended.
>
> "Resource" is a synonym of "Entity" as *now* clearly stated in the latest
> RDF concepts guide [1]. Once we get over the conflation inherent in
> "Resource" and look towards "Entity" the issue starts to get much clearer,
> as exemplified by RDF based Linked Data [2] and its specific use of URIs to
> denote "Entities" while also identifying their "Descriptor Documents".
>
> All "Resources" aren't of the same medium. The Web, Internet are mediums
> distinct from the medium we *refer to* as the real-world. Thus, the claim
> that everything is a "Resource" without medium specificity is one of the
> ultimate recipes for unproductive debate and confusion, as a zillion mail
> threads over the years have demonstrated.
>
> In the context of RDF, a URI denotes an Entity.
> In the context of RDF based Linked Data, a URI denotes an Entity in a
> manner that enables it resolve to a Web Document (denoted by its own URI
> which is usually a URL) that describes the denoted entity (aka. URI
> referent) .
>
>
> Links:
> 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/#resources-and-statements --
> showcasing the critical "Resource" fix
> 2. http://twitpic.com/cbk8ul -- illustrating HTTP URI duality and the
> Semiotic triangle .
>
>
> --
>
> Regards,
>
> Kingsley Idehen	
> Founder & CEO
> OpenLink Software
> Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
> Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
> Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
> Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about
> LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen
>
>
>
>


-- 
Michel Dumontier
Associate Professor of Bioinformatics, Carleton University
Chair, W3C Semantic Web for Health Care and the Life Sciences Interest Group
http://dumontierlab.com