Re: does RDF require understanding all 82 URI schemes?

At 11:15 AM 2/12/01 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>Who owns the thing being discussed?  Let's say that I want to publish
>information about the Battle of Jutland.  If I use the identifier
>
>   http://www.megginson.com/battles.rdf#jutland
>
>I've left anyone else who wants to describe the same battle with a
>choice between two miserable alternatives:
>
>1. use the same identifier, and eternally privilege my information
>over anyone else's; or
>
>2. use a different identifier, and lose any easy possibility of
>collating the information.

Now I think I see where you're coming from.  How about:

3. use a different identifier, and add an annotation along the lines of 
"see also http://www.megginson.com/battles.rdf#jutland".

I think it's reasonable to allow the authorized creator of an identifier 
some privilege over its use.

[Later, I noticed:]
>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.

I'm not sure that expecting everyone to use the same identifier will scale 
either.  It presumes knowledge on the part of the person wishing to make a 
statement about other statements already made.  It is inevitable that new 
identifiers will be created.

Finding out everything anyone ever said about the battle of Jutland seems 
like a pretty hard problem, scale-wise, however you slice it.

I think a scalable approach (or as close as we'll get) will use a 
combination of all these approaches:  well-known names (hopefully 
administered in non-discriminatory fashion), private names, 
cross-references, etc.  Pretty much what you'd face trying to get 
information out of a book library.

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
GK@NineByNine.org

Received on Wednesday, 14 February 2001 10:50:25 UTC