Re: Axiom: Opacity of URIs

On 04/01/07, Ronald P. Reck <rreck@rrecktek.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.


First thoughts - it depends a lot on your application, if you are talking
about the 4-character string "pain" then that presumably would be
language-independent. On the other hand, if you are talking about the
concept(s) pain, then you could either use the ../fre/.. approach or maybe
just use one language for the URIs, with the differences being expressed
elsewhere, e.g.

<http://foo.bar/lexicon/fre/token#pain> rdfs:label "bread"@en .

A (recent!) TAG Finding covers metadata in URIs:

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31.html

Cheers,
Danny.



-- 

http://dannyayers.com