Re: a URI is a name (tel uri scheme and VCARD RDF)

Richard H. McCullough wrote:

> I followed the link at the bottom of this email, and read Sean B. 
> Palmer's interesting essay on URIs. 

I'm not clear on your opinion of Doug's proposal. ;) But you did change 
the subject line so I guess we'll treat this as a new thread.

> For example, if we want to talk about Linus Torvalds in the context of 
> URIs & RDFS, we might have three different somethings that we need 
> three different names for:
>
>     Linus Torvalds the person
>     a document that contains RDFS statements that describe facts about 
> Linus Torvalds
>     a graph that contains nodes and links that describe facts about 
> Linus Torvalds
>
> My impression, based on a few RDF-interest emails, is that much 
> confusion has been generated by trying to use one URI when three URIs 
> are required. 

I think that you misunderstand the debate. It is easy to make up three 
URIs for Linus Torvalds or ten (let's not forget his home page and email 
address and ...). The question is whether the syntactic form of the URI 
restricts whether it refers to him, or his home page or the graph or ...

Seth says:

 >  Linus Torvalda the person
 >    http://foo/#LinusTorvalds
 >  a documdent that contains RDFS statements that describe facts about
 > Linus Torvalds
 >    http://foo/
 >  a graph that contains nodes and links that describe facts about 
Linus > Torvalds
 >    http://foo/#ThisGraph

But an equally consistent position is:

Linus Torvalds the person

     http://foo/LinusTorvalds

   a docudent that contains RDFS statements that describe facts about 
Linus Torvalds

     http://foo/LinusTorvaldsInRDF

   a graph that contains nodes and links that describe facts about Linus 
Torvalds

     http://foo/LinusTorvaldsGraph

Insofar as RDF care NEITHER about the syntax of the URI _nor_ the data 
referred to by the URI, why should WE care? Why impose a syntactic 
convention at all? RDF offers me ways of saying that InRDF is the RDF 
representation and Graph is the graph representation of the 
LinusTorvalds concept. If Seth wants to use his convention then he can, 
but he should also use RDF statements to make explicit the relationship.

  Paul Prescod

Received on Sunday, 24 November 2002 17:48:52 UTC