RE: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys

 
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org
> [mailto:www-rdf-interest-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Miles Sabin
> Sent: 24 April 2002 13:02
> To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys
> 
> 
> Bill de hÓra wrote,
> > Assuming a URI identifies one resource is not a weak
> > assumption;   assuming we'll all agree which resource is very
> > weak.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand the _practical_ significance of that
> distinction.

If I want to merge two graphs of RDF assertions bound to a URI, I
would like to know that the URI is being used for the same resource
before I let an engine process the new graph and make further
inferences. RDF makes assertions about resources, such as they are,
not URIs. 

 
> And tho' I'd agree that it's reasonable to assume that any use of
> a   URI is _intended_ to identify a unique resource, in the
> presence of   multiple uses and multiple intentions the net
> result is that there is   no one resource which can be taken as
> the referent ... IOW, the bare   URI is ambiguous.

Yes. We'd need a theory of reference or pointing, or symbol
grounding, no? Or we could just impose order and have a semantic
web of Newspeak. Another option is to and allow code to reason
statistically or negotiate term grounding about whether a URI is
being used to refer to the same thing. Dan Brickley has talked
about the social compact aspects of URIs before, but the only way I
can conceive of running such common sense though a computer is
statistically or probabilistically.

Bill de hÓra

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Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 08:38:48 UTC