RE: Proposal: new top level domain '.urn' alleviates all need for urn: URIs

On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 09:20, Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:
> But this says nothing whatsoever about equivalence
> of denotation, only about lexical equivalence of the
> URIs themselves.

Correct. Lexical equivalence of URIs is all that RFC 2396(bis) talks
about. If you want to go beyond that then you have to do it in an
application specific manner.

> While it is true that applications operating in terms
> of RFC 2396 alone might presume that two lexically
> distinct URIs denote different resources (entities),
> that does *not* mean that any two URIs *can't* or
> *don't* denote the same resource.

You're mixing your definitions of 'same' again. You are posting this
discussion to the uri@w3.org mailing list, not an RDF or OWL mailing
list. Here we always operate in terms of RFC 2396 alone since that is
how you maintain the generality of URIs. If OWL has a way of saying that
two different URIs have some owl-ish concept of equivalence then great,
go talk about it on the OWL list. Its not a concept that is generally
applicable to all URI schemes and all applications.

> The purpose of the Semantic Web, and tools such as
> OWL, is precisely to provide a standardized means of
> providing such information to such applications.

Great to hear it! But how is that universally applicable unless you are 
suggesting that every application that uses URIs must become OWL and SW
compliant? I hope not. I don't think Cisco hubs can spare the cycles for
parsing RDF graphs.

> Surely RFC 2396 is not intended to prohibit the
> co-denotation of URIs?

Its not intended to prohibit it. But its not intended to mandate it
either. Its a feature of OWL/RDF/SW, not URIs....

-MM

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2003 10:00:41 UTC