- From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2011 07:49:37 +0530
- To: nathan@webr3.org
- Cc: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>, Kjetil Kjernsmo <kjekje@ifi.uio.no>, SW-forum Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
On 2011-03 -19, at 02:21, Nathan wrote: > Here's another quick rewrite: > > David Booth wrote: >> On Fri, 2011-03-18 at 18:55 +0000, Nathan wrote: >>>> Can something be both a birth certificate and a red lightbulb? (my intuition says no). >> In a given graph g, a URI u can perfectly well (ambiguously) identify >> something that is both a birth certificate and a red >> lightbulb, provided that g has no disjointness or other such predicates >> that would prevent it from being so. >> You need to know what graph you are asking about, and what assertions it >> contains, to answer the question. > > So perhaps the question being answered is, can we feasibly carry out a conversation where we refer to both a birth certificate and a red lightbulb by a single ambiguous name? using RDF? > > Possibly, but why even try? Seeing that without having caught up on the thread, No, I really do not want to go down that route, of trying that. It is a fundamental architectural principle that a URI can be taken out of context an needs no other context to figure out what it identifies. So if I say for URI x "x expires on 2015-01-01" I must be able to know whether the lightbulb or the certificate expires. We have a huge linked data infrastructure based in this architecture which I do not want to start again. Tim
Received on Saturday, 19 March 2011 02:20:02 UTC