xmlns, uri+name pairs or just uris..? Clarification needed.

Excuse me for zoning in on this a bit late, but what exactly is the
state of play regarding namespaces in RDF?

As I understand it, an xmlns-qualified name is a pair of (namespace URI,
name); there is no composition function implied apart from the trivial
"shove both bits into a pair".

But RDF claims that resources are (or are identified by) URIs
only; there seems to be an (implicit? explicit?) composition function
that takes the namespace and the name part and produces a URI from them.

Can someone please clear this up for me once and for all?

jan

PS. Obviously a pair of (nsuri, name) can be uniquely mapped onto a URI
using some cheesy hack like inventing a URI scheme like

	nselement:[nsuri]name

but there's probably a better way to do this.

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287163 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
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