Re: silly question about rdf:about

* Lars Marius Garshol
|
| 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.

* Uche Ogbuji
| 
| I disagree.  Do you have some citations?  I don't think I've ever
| heard an RDF person put up a URI and say "this is a person".  I
| don't think I've ever seen the equivalent of this in any RDF
| examples, either.

There isn't a whole lot of RDF out there, but what I've found is
guilty of this error:

 - the MusicBrainz data identifies artists, albums, and tracks with
   http:// URIs

 - the WordNet-in-RDF data uses http:// URIs to identify words

 - airports.rdf uses http:// URIs to identify airports

 - the OpenWine data uses http:// URIs for countries, regions, wine
   producers, grape types, you name it

This is all the "real" RDF data out there that I know about. If people
know of other RDF data dumps I'd love to hear about them.

Of course, the problem starts right here:
  <URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/fig3.gif >
 
| [...]
| Then the confusion is of their own making, not RDF.

So what? Confusion is confusion, no matter where it comes from.
 
| As I said in the nocturne, the uses and meanings of URIs lie at a
| very different layer from RDF.  Since RDF works (or should work)
| with URIs as they are, this is a problem to be solved in URI, not
| RDF.  Ans it's a problem that goes far beyond RDF.

Yes and no. The meaning of http URIs is crystal clear, but their use
in RDF is anything but. The discussions going on in the RDF community
right now show that there is nothing like consensus on whether RDF may
or may not use them to refer to things that are not
network-retreivable, even if it is obvious to all concerned that what
one gets by resolving an http URI *is* network-retreivable.
 
| I don't think that adding a layer of indirection, as Topic Maps
| does, does a *thing* to change this, or goes a single step beyond
| RDF in disambiuating the meanings of things we are describing.

Well, do you understand it?

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

Received on Monday, 15 April 2002 16:37:12 UTC