Re: bNodes wanted

On Fri, 24 May 2002, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:

> > It seems like the question is whether I can properly generate a Skolem
> > constant.  There are several ways to generate URIs that no one else
> > will ever generate; you can pick one that meets your needs:
> >
> >     - the tag: URI algorithm for human-readable ones [1]
> >     - the UUID algorithm for easy machine generation
> >     - a cryptographicaly secure random number if you're
> >       seriously concerned about duplicate generation
> >       (such as by malicious 3rd parties)
>
> None of these work.  As soon as any other agent sees the skolem URIrefs
> then it can use the URIrefs, resulting in them possibly being used in other
> doucuments.

Hey we agree on something :) Absolutely right.


> > If you also want to make sure no one can use it after the fact, then
> > you certainly need bNodes.  But I don't know why you'd want that.  Use
> > cases?
>
> Lets see:
>
> 1/ containers that cannot be added to by other parties
> 2/ resources that cannot be referred to by name, only in terms of their
> relationships to other resources

I guess for 1/, you'd need to be careful not to describe your container
with enough information (such as a daml:UnambiguousProperty, in the
simplest case) to allow others to easily say things about it afterwards.
I'm not sure that's always achievable. You might have some container and
not want anyone to talk about it afterwards; yet others might start
describing it (in RDF+WebOnt/etc) as 'the rdf:Seq that Peter mentioned in
his message of 2002-05-25'. I don't think this can be avoided. Instead,
we'd want strategies to avoid believing things claimed in such a matter,
perhaps?

Dan


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Received on Saturday, 25 May 2002 06:09:34 UTC