Re: name for a resource's URI

Garret Wilson wrote:
> 
> Within RDF, what's the official name for a resource's identifying URI? 
> (I'm wondering because this will help me creating a particular API.) 
> That is, for the resource I identify using URI 
> <http://example.com/example>, if I want to get 
> <http://example.com/example>, am I wanting:
> 
>    * The resource's name?
>    * The resource's ID?
>    * The resource's URI?
>    * The resource's identifying URI?
>    * The resource's reference URI?
>    * The resource's URI reference?
>    * The thing that names the resource node? :)
> 
> What's the official name for this thing? It should have some sort of 
> name, so that we can refer to it consistently in RDF specifications. 
> (e.g. "The resource's ___ must be a URI reference.")
> 
> For example, the RDF Primer says that URI references are used to 
> identify resources; does this mean that the official name for this thing 
> is "the resource's URI reference?"

I'd suggest this is more a Web Architecture issue than an RDF issue, 
although these topics do tend to surface first in the RDF world.

In the general Web architecture case, I'd also suggest "a" rather than 
"the", since we allow for the possibility that some thing (aka resource) 
may have no URIs, many URIs, etc.

However in RDF as currently defined, each node in the graph has at most 
one URI label. So the situation of a thing having multiple URIs has to 
be graphed using several nodes, and eg. owl:sameAs relations between them.

So the answer probably depends upon whether you're taking about the 
world described by RDF (eg. then we might say "a URI for the resource", 
allowing multiple URIs) or about the detail of an RDF graph itself (eg. 
"the URI label on the node").

cheers,

Dan

Sorry if this sounds angels-on-pinheads!

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2007 22:12:16 UTC