- From: Brian McBride <bwm@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 10:30:50 +0100
- To: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
- CC: rdf core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
Aaron, The thing to bear in mind about this submission is that these were not my words. They were the words (with some HP specific stuff removed) of my colleagues who are using RDF in the manner described. This input is from real developers. Aaron Swartz wrote: > > On Monday, July 16, 2001, at 02:23 PM, Brian McBride wrote: > > > (1) In the seller advert it would appear that the seller is > > only advertising a > > single specific (but under-specified) service, #anon12345 or > > whatever, which > > would be hard to distinguish from an actual service instance > > like #service42. > > Why would you want to distinguish between the two? I think the idea here is that there will be URI's denoting specific services. My colleagues are interpretting a node with a URI to be denoting such a service. It would be wrong to match a different service. When an anonymous node is specified, then no such constraint exists. Thus a processor would process these two instances differently. > And I see > nothing about a URI that licenses you to assume that there is > only such thing. Oh we really do need this model theory don't we. I tend to think of a URI as identifying one thing, and one thing only, but that way lies a philosphical debate on the nature of 'one'. Shudder! > > > (2) Similarly in the buyer advert instead of describing a > > template, giving the > > service a URI would make it appear that I am looking for a > > specific service with > > that URI. > > Umm, aren't you? What's the difference? In both you're looking > for something with these properties. The difference is that when a URI is specified the assumption is that someone, somewhere has defined a 'well known' name for this service. The essence of this issue seems to involve the idea that the act of naming something in the internet is somehow, special. That if a processor is told that something has URI ISBN-12345 or whatever, it had better not match that with anything that it does not 'know' is named ISBN-12345. On the other hand, if a node is not named, then it can be matched with anything that matches its properties. I'm not sure that standard FOL captures this. FOL is built around a conceptual model where there can be many interpretations for statements in the FOL. But that is not the situation we are in here. We have one interpretation - its a mapping to the world out there. Intuitively I feel that makes a difference. That makes naming special. Brian
Received on Tuesday, 17 July 2001 05:33:24 UTC