- From: Thomas B. Passin <tpassin@home.com>
- Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 18:25:31 -0400
- To: "RDF-IG" <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
[Seth Russell] > Hi Murray > > Well I should have been clearer. I meant to say that you cannot ~transmit~ > the identity of a thing by transmitting it's URI or any other syntactic > construct whatsoever. So defining these globally unique strings does not > give us some magical identity matrix in the ether on which we can map our > things. I think a lot of semantic web builders are (perhaps > subconsciously) thinking, or wishing that it will. > > For example: > > [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt starts with the assertion > > "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) provide a simple > and extensible means for identifying a resource." > > It then goes on to say that: > > "A resource can be anything that has identity." > > Well I claim that a URI does NOT provide a means for identifying anything > that has identity. Such a means of identifying things would need to be a > method (a process) acted upon by a community of usage. Without the method, > without the process, without the community, these globally unique strings > will just hang there against a background of static; and will not even > constitute information. > Not altogether. The strings themselves, along with the map (topic map, conceptual graph, rdf database) constitute an abstract structure which encodes a great deal of information. The thing is to connect that information to the world, of course. Ontologies wish to address this, but of course at some point there is still the same question. It's just like arithmetic- five basic axioms (AFAIR) - and somehow they get connected to the world. I'm really agreeing with you, but wanted to point out that the uri string can in fact "constitute information". Cheers, Tom P
Received on Saturday, 25 August 2001 18:22:12 UTC