- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 15:16:55 -0700
- To: <msabin@interx.com>, <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
> Joshua Allen wrote, > > Interoperability means that if I aggregate 500 different assertions > > from different sources, all about http://www.microsoft.com, I know > > that they all are talking about the same "thing". > > Yes, but _what_ thing is that? I guess it's possible that there are > 500 different different assertion about that document. I'm sure that > there are many more which use the very same identifier to refer to > Microsoft Corporation. > That is exactly the point. There *will* be thousands of assertions about both the home page and the company, but only if people can trust that their assertion will apply to the right thing. If I publish assertions about http://www.microsoft.com and there are some other fools using the exact same URI to publish assertions about the *organization* that maintains www.microsoft.com, then my metadata is absolutely useless (except in my own closed system). We might a well go back to the days of hypercard, since metadata will be useless. Unless people can know that a particular URI identifies one particular "thing", there will be no point in publishing metadata, and there will be no semantic web.
Received on Monday, 22 April 2002 18:17:27 UTC