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

[Danny Ayers]
>
>  http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html  can refer to a person or intellectual
> content (depending on the context).
>

Aha!  And here, perhaps, we have it.  This is actually a heavy-duty piece of
philosophy:  "what is the real subject of interest here?"  Is it

a) the person sometimes called "Mark Baker", who is known to be a person and
who is known to store intellectual content,

b) actually two subjects, one of them a person and the other a particular
set of intellectual content?

c) an alias for either of the above?

Notice that 1) is expressed like an anonymous node, b) like two statements
(e.g., "Mark Baker" typeOf person), and c) is also a kind of statement.

I don't really have too much of a problem accepting any of these
interpretations.  My problem is in knowing which one to use in different
circumstances.  If by convention, I fear no convention will be flexible
enough and anyway there will be many violations, whether by people who don't
understand the convention or by machines that don't have the ability.

If by annotation (I mean by additional statements that say which
interpretation to use), that is a practice used by Topic maps.  Otherwise,
there is context, as Danny has started to insist on, if we can work out how
to use it.

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2002 09:10:09 UTC