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

Danny Ayers wrote,
> What if we consider the URI to represent a *set* then the 
> assertions :
>
> A http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html has long hair
> B http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html is hosted in Florida
>
> can be made 'in the wild', in that A & B refer to a different 
> element in the set http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html
>
> If we wish to reason with such statements, then locally we can pull 
> out the element of the set of interest, and give it a local unique 
> identifier (if necessary).
>
> If we want to harvest assertions about
> http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html the person, then we look for 
> those statements containing this URI, but only with predicates that 
> apply to or on a person.

This is pretty close to what I've been mulling over.

In fact, given your local renaming based on predicate satisfaction,
it's not a million miles away from the qua proposal I made earlier.
Effectively you're saying that predicates are typed, ie., that

  __ has long hair

is applicable to satisfiers of the 'person' predicate, and that

  __ is hosted in Florida

is applicable satisfiers of the 'document' predicate. Assuming that
nothing is both a person and a document, then a term-forming operator 
like qua could be used to reify predicate satisfaction such that,

  (x qua person) != (x qua document)

and such that,

  (x qua person) has long hair
  (x qua document) is hosted in Florida

typecheck, whereas,

  (x qua person) is hosted in Florida
  (x qua document) has long hair

don't.

In addition, we no longer have to worry too much about any possibly 
ambiguous reference of the unqualified x's. When it comes to making 
assertions we can assign local names to qua-terms, and proceed as 
tho' there were no ambiguity, eg.,

  let mark      = (http://www.markbaker.ca qua person),
      aboutmark = (http://www.markbaker.ca qua document)
  in
    aboutmark dc:Creator mark
  end;

('scuse the rough and ready ML'ish syntax).

> Now shoot me down in flames...

Not at all ... I think our positions are pretty close.

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2002 07:00:08 UTC