Re: Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and Linked Data

Sorry for the late response.  The cross-posting messed up my mail filters.

On 7/7/07, Chris Bizer <chris@bizer.de> wrote:
> 1. DBpedia: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee
> 2. Hannover DBLP Server:
> http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/resource/authors/Tim_Berners-Lee
> 3. Berlin DBLP Server:
> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007
> 4. RDF Book Mashup:
> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/Tim+Berners-Lee

[...]

> Question 1: According to the terminology of the Architecture of the WWW
> document [4] are all these URIs aliases for the same non-information
> resource (our current view) or are they referring to different resources?
> Does the TAG finding "On Linking Alternative Representations To Enable
> Discovery And Publishing " [5] about generic and specific resources apply
> here, meaning that the URIs 1,2,3,5 refer to different specific
> non-information resources that are related to one generic non-information
> resource?

IMO, those URIs identify different resources.  I say this because they
all return different representations when I dereference them.  If they
identified the same resource then their representations would be
identical (see Roy's definition of resource in his REST dissertation).

The tricky bit here is to remember to account for agency; to recognize
that although dbpedia.org uses URI #1 to identify Tim, from a third
party's POV it identifies dbpedia.org's *view* of Tim.

> Question 3: Depending on the answer to question 1, is it correct to use
> owl:sameAs [6] to state that http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i and
> http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee refer to the same thing as it is
> done in Tim's profile.

No.  AIUI, owl:sameAs is a very strong predicate which declares
subject and object to be the same resource.  I only foresee it being
used by a publisher to declare equivalence of their own URIs, because
being able to guarantee equivalence requires a very tight degree of
control over them (i.e. be able to serve identical representations for
all time).

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.  Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.         http://www.markbaker.ca
Coactus; Web-inspired integration strategies  http://www.coactus.com

Received on Sunday, 22 July 2007 12:37:50 UTC