Axiom: Opacity of URIs

I have a question about URIs. I think I understand the axioms here:
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html

My question concerns the Axiom: Opacity of URIs

When I work with words/strings I want to say something about them.
Now, imagine the English word "pain".
rdf:about="http://foo.com/lexicon/token#pain"

Its real helpful to be able to derive its URI so that every time I come
upon the same string I dont incur the "pain" associated with asking some
system the question: do you know the URI for the string "pain"?

Now, imagine I am processing French and I also have the string "pain".
Well, I believe its intrinsically a different word so I think it makes 
sense to change my URI structure to
rdf:about="http://foo.bar/lexicon/fre/token#pain"

Attractive but wrong?
Wrong only when I look for French words with "//fre" ?

I run into the same situation when I want to manage definitions for
words from multiple communities of interest. The word "frequency" has
slightly different meanings in the domain of mathematics, physics or
signal processing. Again, it is attractive to have derivable URI's.

Can someone please comment or point me at relevant disscussion in this 
area? -thanks.

Received on Thursday, 4 January 2007 19:40:05 UTC