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

On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 11:07, Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: ext Michael Mealling [mailto:michael@neonym.net]
> > On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 09:20, Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> I'm not proposing any such thing, only that RFC 2396 not
> preclude the possibility that two lexically distinct URIs
> might denote the same resource.

What definition of 'resource' are you using in that last statement? The
one found in 2396 or the one used by OWL/RDF/SW. They're two different
things (and should be two different terms). Let's do that for clarity's
sake: A URI-Resource is the abstract thing that a URI is bound to. An
SW-resource is a first order object that can make statements about
itself such as its uniqueness, how its compared to others, etc. An
SW-resource can also be a URI-Resource but when it is referred to as a
URI-Resource it looses all of its SW-ish properties.

I would then rewrite your last sentence like this:

"I'm not proposing any such thing, only that RFC 2396 not
preclude the possibility that two lexically distinct URIs
might denote the same SW-resource."

Your first statement is vague. My slight-rewording of it isn't and is
now correct and does not attempt to make equivalence statements about
URI-Resources when there is no method for doing so at that layer.

> You seem to be asserting that they can't, at the level of
> URIs alone, which hamstrings any higher layers.
> 
> > > 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. 
> 
> Well, all fine and good. But your earlier comments strongly
> suggested otherwise.

Again, whenever you use the term 'resource' in an unqualified way I am
assuming you are limiting your language to what is found in RFC 2396
which has no language for stating equivalences for Resources. If you are
using 'resource' in another way then be clear about it.

-MM

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2003 12:28:43 UTC