What if an URI also is a URL

suppose I identfy mysef with the following URI:

http://www.example.com/mophor

And suppose I have a homepage at http://www.example.com, then we get the 
following triple:

<http://www.example.com/mophor>
<http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/homepage>
<http://www.example.com>

But now suppose, I have a page about myself on my homepage somewhere, 
http://www.example.com/mophor, say.

What you now have is that the URI identifying me is also a URL with a 
page about me. Now I want to make a statement linking these two, for 
example with a http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#seeAlso predicate. 
At first thought, we would get

<http://www.example.com/mophor>
<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#seeAlso>
<http://www.example.com/mophor>

Where the subject is the URI and the object the URL

Of course, this is somewhat strange, without extra information, one can 
not discern between the two meanings for the resource (me or the page 
about me). Furthermore, the uniqueness of the URI is less pronounced.

This could be resolved as follows:	

<http://www.example.com/mophor>
<http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#seeAlso>
"http://www.example.com/mophor"

i.e. adding the webpage URL as a literal. As I look around in various 
RDF documents around the web, this is rarely done.

Any thoughts about this?

The RDF does talk about this issue in some way 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/#structuredproperties) and resolves it 
by using blank nodes (that would be a blank node to identify me). 
However, I want to make the resource describing me "portable", i.e. 
described by one (defined) URI.

Regards,
Rikkert Koppes

Received on Wednesday, 6 June 2007 11:28:18 UTC