- From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
- Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 10:03:11 -0500
- To: "David Megginson" <david@megginson.com>, <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
David Megginson wrote: > Martin Duerst writes: > > > The answer to this was obvious to me two seconds after reading > > through your complaints. And then in the next mail showed that > > it already exists: > > > > > <#x> > > > daml:equivalentTo > > > http://www.megginson.com/battles.rdf#jutland > > > > I already answered this one privately -- this solution won't scale, > because it requires you to retrieve a resource to find the aliased > identifier. If you're dealing with more than a few objects, you'll > end up with an exponential explosion of network access. That's not to > say that an equivalent-to property isn't a good idea; only that it's > not a practical alternative to sharing the same identifier. Alternatively, and preferably in many cases, construct a thesaurus. Perhaps this is an application for topic maps. Perhaps an application might extract daml:equivalentTo properties into an external document. > > > Do they need that? Maybe not. In everyday language, we never > > use social security numbers. The identity of the objects we speak > > about is part of the web of language, not outside of it. In healthcare the SSN is the closest (yet imperfect) unique identifier. Several problems: 1) SSN's are reused (so same problem as mailboxes). 2) People sometimes 'share' a friend or relative's SSN... this is the real killer for any unique identification system other than a biometric (fingerprint or retinal scan ... these can also change though!) But this problem is a huge one for the healthcare field. Things like "master patient index" are good examples of real world thesauri which map so-called unique identifiers (e.g. patient id) from one part of an institution to another. Having taken part in the merging of several healthcare organizations I can assure you that its all alot of fun (and good healthy human readable prefixes to UIDs such as are found with URLs are a really huge help in these cases). Jonathan Borden The Open Healthcare Group http://www.openhealth.org
Received on Tuesday, 13 February 2001 10:17:18 UTC