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

[thread blend]

Probably a point of philosophy, but I don't think it is possible in any
communication to truly resolve some of the underlying issues.

What is possible in practice is to use metadata to remove ambiguity relating
to assertions that use URIs, by reference to humanly agreed definitions
which have unique labels, e.g.

http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/#Creator

This refers to "the name of the person or organization primarily responsible
for creating the intellectual content" of something, so if I state that

http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html dc:Creator
http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html

then it can inferred that one of these is a person or organisation and the
other something with intellectual content. No conflict.

I reckon it's counting angels [1] to try and sort the precise nature of a
URI out, when mechanisms exist that allow us to use the things.

Cheers,
Danny.


[1] http://www.citnames.com/2001/misc/angels.htm


>-----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 22:28
>To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
>Subject: RE: Disambiguation; keeping the "U" in "URI"
>
>
>Mark Baker wrote,
>> Nick Matsakis wrote:
>> > 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" ?
>>
>> "http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html"
>
>This is where Mark and I differ. This new URI may indeed be yet
>another of Marks aliases, but it _also_ designates, in the context of
>a GET, a document with information associated with Mark. IOW, this use
>of Content-Location: wrt http://www.markbaker.ca hasn't resolved the
>original ambiguity between Mark and a document, it's just set us off
>chasing Content-Location: pointers ad nauseam. That's unhelpful IMO.
>
>I'm happy with the use of Content-Location: as a mechanism for
>resolving ambiguity between retrievable referents (eg. for variant
>representation selection), but it doesn't solve the whole problem.
>
>FWIW, I was half expecting Marks response to Nicks question to be
>something like "Sitting in his office chair", using some kind of
>geolocation URI scheme (is there one?). Also, IMO, not very helpful,
>but more obviously consistent with his position wrt Content-Location:
>
>Cheers,
>
>
>Miles
>

Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 18:03:55 UTC