Re: names, URIs and ontologies

Jos,

Napespaces, as mentioned in http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Webize.html, are a syntactical workaround, introduced "for brevity and syntactic reasons".
They can be compared to C preprocessor macros, or XML entities :
in the end, they are replaced by URI prefices.
So they are not an alternative to URIs, since they do not *really* belong to the lexicon.

By the way, URI schemes are some kind of namespaces,
and even if it is better, as I said, to use commonly agreed schemes,
I know many people (including myself) using "private" URI schemes in their applications.

  Pierre-Antoine

jos.deroo.jd@belgium.agfa.com wrote:
> 
> Pierre-Antoine,
> 
> > The ideal URI for boston would be city:/USA/Massachusets/Boston
> > It assumes that the "city:" scheme is commonly agreed on,
> > but any kind of public name has to do that agreement assumption.
> 
> Why not just declare city as a namespaceprefix? You can have as many
> as you want (commonly agreed on or not) and scoped just as you want.
> We found a lot of motivation in http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Webize.html
>    [[[
>    Namespaces c and u are introduced for two reasons: for brevity,
>    as repeating them in the code would have been too cumbersome;
>    and for syntactic reasons as URIs tend to contain characters which
>    would be ambiguous with other syntax is allowed in SQL column names.
>    ]]]

Received on Tuesday, 31 October 2000 03:08:00 UTC