Re: names, URIs and ontologies

pat hayes wrote:

>  In http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Webize.html, Tim seems to
> be  focussing on the issue of 'webizing' in the sense of making sure
> that when c uses "foo" (in a purely private sense) and d also happens
> to use "foo" in a similarly private way, that everyone else doesnt
> get these two private uses confused with each other.

Pat you are confusing me.  I though Tim was saying that if anyone uses
a URI with  _my_ namespace prefix (example: 
names:robustai.net/chiggy#foo), then they are asserting that they are
talking about the exact same thing that am talking about when I use
that URI.  It doesn't matter where in the Web they record their
message, or who records it.    And the plan is for people to try to
use URIs from standard namespaces for our common public concepts as
much as possible.  Please, somebody, correct me if I am operating
under a misapprehension.  Pat, If this is true, wouldn't you have
exactly what you want?

I think Tim's plan works only in as much as we do use common URIs; to
the extent that everybody makes up their own URIs to talk about their
own private matters, we don't have a semantic web at all; we would
just have the tower of babble to which you refer.

If my assumptions are correct (sheeze i hope they are) this still
means that one will probably encounter many different URIs for the
same concept.   Pat, does this problem bear on your consearns?   The
only solution I see to that problem is for each local application of
the Semantic Web to install some kind of fuzzy node matcher that would
attempt to combine nodes that are really the same based upon their
relationships to literals and other known nodes.  In combining nodes
the applications could preserve all the original URIs and the sources
from which they were originally read.  Then when the application wants
to speak RDF to those sources, they could use the URIs which that
source will recognize.  I provide an example in my signature.

<signature>
topic: Seth Russell
URI:  http://robustai.net/~seth/index.htm
email: seth@robustai.net
waiting for:  RSS
is working on:  MyMemory
needs collaboration on: MyMemory

topic: RSS
anagramOf: (alternative: Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary)
URI (from source: http://rss.oreillynet.com/): http://purl.org/rss/
URI (from source: http://InternetAlchemy.org/):
http://InternetAlchemy.org/rss/
URI (from source: http://www.xml.com/):
http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/07/17/syndication/rss.html

topic: MyMemory
description: "a local application of the Semantic Web"
hasAbilityTo: (and:  (read RdF) (write RDF))
</signature>

Received on Tuesday, 31 October 2000 15:29:49 UTC