Re: Disambiguation; keeping the "U" in "URI"

On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, Mark Baker wrote:

> Re disambiguation, as I've said repeatedly (don't people believe me?
> 8-), HTTP has the Content-Location header for doing just this.

I don't understand what you mean by this.  What should the
"Content-Location" be on an http request for the (person)
http://www.markbaker.ca ?  "Sitting in his office chair" ?

> Re the IBM web site, I would expect that somewhere on the order of 99%
> of all the back links to "http://www.ibm.com" are using it to identify
> the company, not the Web page.

I think this is a matter for debate.  People like to link to a company's
web sites in sentences that refer to the company, but this is purely a
matter of convention; any human reading the setence has no problem
disambiguating that the link points to a website while the word (e.g.
"IBM") in the sentence refers to the company.  Nonetheless, what people do
in HTML should have negligible influence on what people do in RDF.

I am quickly coming to the conclusion that there are only two options
left:

  1. Don't use http:// URIs in RDF you author/process/trust
  2. Don't trust URIs to refer to distinct entities

It seems that giving up 2 defeats the purpose of RDF.  So, are we just
left with 1?

Nick Matsakis

Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 15:54:39 UTC