- From: Sergey Melnik <melnik@db.stanford.edu>
- Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 14:13:33 -0800
- To: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
- CC: RDF Core <w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org>
Patrick Stickler wrote: > > It has occurred to me that tidy literal nodes seem incompatable > with the view that a node in the graph maps to one and only one > thing in the universe. > > The reason why URI labeled nodes can be tidy is because URIs > are globally unique, and URIs are presumed to have a consistent > global meaning. But literals are like local names, and their > meaning is dependent on context. Literals do not have a consistent > global meaning. > [...] I understand that URIs are presumed to have a consistent global meaning. Unfortunately, URIs are often used inconsistently. For example, a URL of a homepage or an email address are frequently (mis)used as identifiers for persons, and at the same time they identify homepages and email addresses. Therefore, I feel that the literals are the only truly reliable entities in an RDF graph. Literals don't lie - their meaning is determined by their content... Sergey
Received on Monday, 4 February 2002 16:43:29 UTC