Re: Mistaken identity?

> Just because you use a particular URI as an rdf identifier doesn't
> automatically mean that the rdf resource is equal to the web page returned
> when you dereference the uri.

No, it is equal to the resource a representation of which is returned when you
dereference the URI.

  In fact, rdf's position about that notion is
> not really specified.

That URIs identify resources was already specified elsewhere.

> So how could you make a statement about the actual thing returned by
> http://mydomain.org/a?  Make up a resource type, and assign the URL to it,
> something like this -
> 
> {danny:a rdf:type danny:WebPage}
> {danny:a danny:URL 'http://mydomain.org/a'}
> 
> Get fancy and declare danny:URL to be inverse functional if you like.  
> 
> I know that some people don't like this kind of approach, but it removes the
> ambiguity and clearly says what you mean.

Quite the opposite. The resource identified by <http://mydomain.org/a> has some
sort of relationship to the string 'http://mydomain.org/a'. Knowledge of the
predicate <http://mydomain.org/URL> is needed to work out what this is, that's
much more ambiguous.

Something like this is useful if you are talking about the representation
itself, but mostly representations are a means to an end.

-- 
Jon Hanna
<http://www.hackcraft.net/>
"…it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for
equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people." - jargon.txt

Received on Tuesday, 22 June 2004 12:19:03 UTC