RE: RDFTM Disposition of Comments (RDFTM-DC001)

* Steve Pepper
|
| We are talking about the *base* RDF model in which a resource can
| only have a single URI as an identifier.
 
* Dan Connolly
|
| Er... no, that's just not the case. A resource can have any
| number of URIs as identifiers.

I don't think we disagree (I hope :) but there is clearly an
issue of terminology that needs to be sorted out here.

I may have this completely wrong and, if so, correct me, but
my understanding is as follows:

1) Resources in RDF are represented by nodes
2) A node may have at most one URI reference (some have none)
3) The URI reference of a node is an identifier for the resource
   represented by the node
4) In the absence of a vocabulary beyond that defined by RDF
   itself, a resource can thus only have a single identifier.

Clearly an RDF graph may contain multiple nodes (with different
URIrefs) that are *intended* to represent the same resource, but
in the absence of a property such as owl:sameAs, there is no way
for an application to know that they do in fact represent the
same resource.

Am I right so far?

| | This has been clarified in the text.
| 
| pointer?

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/RDFTM/survey-2005-03-17.html#identity

I guess it could be made even more explicit in the first paragraph
that we are talking about the core RDF model and vocabulary. Would
that help?

Steve

--
Steve Pepper <pepper@ontopia.net>
Chief Strategy Officer, Ontopia
Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3
Editor, XTM (XML Topic Maps 1.0)

Received on Thursday, 24 March 2005 10:23:34 UTC