Re: Referencing items in RDF

Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org> wrote:

>> Given these two URIs...how do I represent the value "Ora Lassila"?
> 
> One way is like this: "Ora Lassila". The value represents itself quite
> well.

Aww, Dan. :-) You're a clever trickster. Either you're trying to be funny,
or you misunderstood me.

> Literal strings are something like un-named resources, you identify them
> through providing their content, since they
> don't themselves have Web names (URIs). Like other resources, you might
> also identify them through description. Just as we might say "the company
> whose homepage is xxx" or "the person whose personalMailbox if yyy", we
> might say "the chunk of nameless data whose foo-checksum is zzz". This
> kind of strategy can uniquely pick out something without using/needing a
> URI for it.

Yes, my question is how does one represent (in machine-readable syntax,
preferably a URI) the value of a statement such as "the creator of the
homepage qqq" -- that is, not the literal value, as you describe with the
image includes, but the opposite: a reference to the value (perhaps as found
through some sort of RDF searching mechanism).

I can say "Ora Lassila" but that value won't change when Ora updates her RDF
statements. I can say "the creator of homepage qqq" but that's a human
statement, which no program I know of can parse. So I want a parse-able
representation of a statement like "the creator of homepage qqq".

> Yes... the data-aggregating power of RDF largely comes from having
> piggybacked on the Web naming system. That said, I think sometimes in RDF
> land we've over emphasised the need to have URIs for
> everything. Oftentimes we'll be able to get by through identifying
> resources by description rather than by name (now we've got a framework
> for describing resources!). It's a bootstrapping thing...

My question is is there a way to give these descriptions names. I like
names, they make me happy because there's less ambiguity they're easier to
code.

> Not sure if this answers your question!

I think I wasn't clear. I hope this clarifies it. Thanks for the cool base64
encodes, though! (Learn something new everyday.)

-- 
        Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
<http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy yourself."
  <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan

Received on Sunday, 3 September 2000 09:28:42 UTC