- From: <tim.glover@bt.com>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2007 09:54:06 +0100
- To: <conal.tuohy@vuw.ac.nz>
- Cc: <semantic-web@w3.org>
>the owner of a URI has the right to define what it identifies... But that right is unenforceable. McDonalds might define a "McJob" as a fulfilling career choice, but they cannot prevent other people using it to mean something else. Surely it is futile to insist that a particular string has only one meaning, ***EVEN IF it begins with the characters "http://" ***!!! In fact, maybe no two people ever mean exactly the same thing by a given string... BUT given that two people agree of certain statements about them, they can be guaranteed to agree on certain conclusions. That's where reasoning helps :) And of course it is quite impossible to prevent people using different strings to refer to related concepts. So don't try! (as an aside, I cannot help thinking that that a great deal of confusion has been caused by using URIs for everything. Surely the meaning of a string cannot be determined by the fact that a piece of software leads it to another string - doesn't that lead to infinite regression..? Maybe it would simplify things to talk about strings of letters, and keep dereferencing as a special case. ) Tim.
Received on Wednesday, 25 July 2007 08:54:58 UTC