Re: silly question about rdf:about

* Nikita Ogievetsky
|
| What I am saying is that given a statement like this:
| 
| http://uche.ogbuji.net :characteristics :very-interesting
| 
| will leave many people puzzled whether I mean that you are a very
| interesting person or that your website is definitely worth looking
| at. :-)

* Uche Ogbuji
| 
| It shouldn't leave least bit puzzled.  It is obviously talking
| aboout the Web site, not the person.

I think Nikita is right. If you look at the RDF currently being
published, most of it (if not all), uses http URIs to point to things
that are not network-retrievable resources.

So while I agree that there *ought* to be no confusion, I think that
in practice there is. This could be fixed by providing convenient and
understandable mechanisms for handling this, but current practice
seems to be broken.
 
| But I don't see the confusion.  RFC 1738, which governs the URI
| http://uche.ogbuji.net makes it clear that this URI
| locates/identifies the document that is retrieved using HTTP and
| that address.  Why would anyone thing it represents a person?

Because lots of people use URIs that way.
 
| Maybe I'm just thick, but I just do not come close to understanding
| Topic Maps.  There are just too many moving parts interacting in
| confusing ways.  I must say, though, from observice the discussiuons
| at KT, that I'm not sure anyone really does.

I find this a puzzling statement. To me they are very clear, and it
seems to me that most topic mappers feel the same way.

It really is quite simple. In fact, I don't think it's much harder to
understand than RDF is. RDF isn't all that complex, but it still does
take a while to grok. The problem being more the lack of good
documentation than anything else.

-- 
Lars Marius Garshol, Ontopian         <URL: http://www.ontopia.net >
ISO SC34/WG3, OASIS GeoLang TC        <URL: http://www.garshol.priv.no >

Received on Sunday, 14 April 2002 18:04:51 UTC