RE: Personal URI?

On 2002-08-07, Danny Ayers uttered to Barney.Govan@eu.sony.com and RDF-interest:

>The assumption is being made that people will want to be identified,
>which suggests a generalised solution.

Actually the assumption is that people's wants are pretty much irrelevant,
here. This is a question in software engineering, not in politics. There
are valid applications where one might want to use a unique identifier for
people when they exist, so it's reasonable to expect SW infra to support
those applications.

>In practice, I would suggest that Seth's bNode approach will be
>perfectly adequate - e.g. "give me a list of the books written by the
>bloke who came up with html". Not precise enough? - add another rule,
>which may be his/her surname, email address, national insurance number
>or the title/Amazon URL of another work.

However, the same goes for everything else, from web pages to abstract
works to whatever else you might name with a URI. By this token, there is
absolutely no need for URI labelled nodes in RDF graphs, since everything
can be taken care of by a suitable arrangement of anonymous nodes and
daml:unAmbiguousProperties.

>Locally, we might use a 99-digit id number, but in the wild the
>id-by-association should be plenty (and better matches the conceptual
>frameworks in which it is likely to be used).

However, *if* NID's are already available, I think it should be possible
to use them as such, just like we use ISBN's for books. For those of us
who don't have/want a NID, an anonymous node is pretty much ideal.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2

Received on Wednesday, 7 August 2002 08:33:14 UTC