RE: Disambiguation; keeping the "U" in "URI" (& Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys)

I may be too young and ignorant but all these URI ambiguity threads seem
meaningless.

There is no ambiguity, just incomplete semantics. Is it so difficult to
do something like

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.ibm.com"
mm:onLineRepresentationOf="http://www.myDomain.org/schemes/entities/comp
anies#ibm">

Of course, one would say, the object here is a document fragment as
well; not IBM. However, it is my most accurate representation of IBM as
a company using RDFS. If that is not enough, we can just throw RDF out
of the window and get over with it.

A URL identifies a document. Not it's creator or owner, but just a
document. All URLs identify a document; whether that is retrievable or
it returns a 404 is irrelevant. That includes what people call URIs when
http is used (don't ask).

Now, a document, can be a representative of it's owner or creator, thus
we point to it as if it where that entity because it represents it.

I see no ambiguity at all; RDF is an extensible mechanism for metadata
schemes; describing what a *document* may represent under certain
circumstances is what comes natural no?

The above methodology (not even that since it's just the way RDF works)
can be applied to any type of URI, erasing all that ambiguity
considerations; All that is needed perhaps, is a common vocabulary to
describe likewise representations. Making URIs clear does not mean our
metadata will be clear to each other.

My point is, we cannot expect from RDF to do by itself the part of the
work that is ours; Resource Description Framework is just the tool to do
it.

Just my .25,

Manos

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2002 04:06:18 UTC