- From: Jeff Sussna <jeff.sussna@quokka.com>
- Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2000 15:29:55 -0800
- To: "'guha@epinions-inc.com'" <guha@epinions-inc.com>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
Why can't a person have a URI? I for one am using RDF to talk about abstract concepts (such as sports, teams, competitors, and so forth). These concepts are actually more important to me than concrete assets. I am using URN's to identify them, but I don't see why specific protocols couldn't be defined. It seems to me that the semantic web faces a fundamental issue, which is how do you reliably identify abstract things you want to talk about? Note that I said "reliably", not "canonically", since it may not be possible or desirable to impose a canonical identification scheme. It would certainly simplify things, but it might also bring along undesirable baggage such as centralized object servers. Jeff -----Original Message----- From: Guha [mailto:guha@epinions-inc.com] Sent: Friday, March 03, 2000 2:34 PM To: Tim Berners-Lee Cc: Guha; www-rdf-interest Subject: Re: Subclass of Thing/Resource Tim, I think many of these questions center around precisely defining what an RDF Resource Identifier is supposed to be. I agree that we need to distinguish between RDF Resource identifiers and URIs. A URI is a pretty formal object (protocol + host + opaque string) whose definition pretty concretely constrains what can have a URI. By this definition, people, places, etc. cannot have URIs. On the other hand, it would be very convenient to have a unique canonical identifier for refering to the one TimBL or one RalphSwick. In my reading, this is what the RDF Resource ID is. Everything (including literals, URIs, ...) could potentially have one of these. I do think it would be nice if an application can assume some kind of structure to these identifiers, but not being able to do so would not be fatal. I agree with you that http://foo.org/bar.rdf#xyz is a lousy identifier for an object. To me, it just represents a position is a file. In the long run, the object identifier namespace will have to be like the DNS namespace. Reactions? guha
Received on Friday, 3 March 2000 18:24:05 UTC