- From: Jonathan Borden <jborden@mediaone.net>
- Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 13:10:06 -0500
- To: "pat hayes" <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>, "Stefan Decker" <stefan@db.stanford.edu>
- Cc: <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
Stefan Decker wrote; > > Disclaimer: I'am not saying that the OID should point to anything > retrievable. All that is necessary is the ability to construct > a global unique object identifier for a given entity. > URIs seem to be one way to do this, however, certainly extensions > are necessary. I'll say it then. A URI should point to something. If a URI doesn't point to anything, then it is no more useful than any of the other myriad types of OID/UID mechanisms. Simply using a URI to create an OID is ho hum... what makes a URI interesting in this regards is the possibility of retreiving something, perhaps a description of what is being named. A URI that identifies a person might reference a CV, for example, or a schema that describes to a machine how to parse such a CV, or whatever else might be useful. If we are just talking about representing abstract information as a directed graph, been there, done that, ho hum. The difference is that there exists an infrastructure, DNS, web servers etc. which has already been widely implemented and can assist in dereferencing arcs. Certainly there are other ways to identify things and talk about things, but the bottom line is that such other mechanisms don't have millions of waiting and willing Apache servers. -Jonathan > > > >Believe me, I am vividly aware of what those limits are. I've been working > >in AI for 25 years. But machines can draw conclusions from axioms which do > >not use URI's, for sure. And that's as useful today as it was 25 years ago. > > > >>The whole point for using URIs > >>is that they are decentralized; anyone can set one up. While it is true > >>that you can't use URIs to represent everything, you can use them to name > >>anything which is namable. > > > >Well, that is either trivial or false. You can, of course, put a name at a > >location with a URI and then use that. So in that sense URI's are > >universal, but that's a trivial sense, In that sense every piece of paper > >is in an envelope because you could put it in one. But it is not true > >that every possible *name* is a URI. My name is not a URI. "Boston" is not > >a URI, and neither is "4,367". > > Your name, "Boston" and "4,367" each have an unlimited number of URIs e.g. http://www.google.com/search?q=Boston This URI references a collection of 7,200,000 other URIs each of which reference a resource that at least at one time contained the term "Boston" That is just one example. Rather than questioning whether using URIs is useful, perhaps we should be discussing ways to improve on what millions of people already use on almost a daily basis. Unfortunately pubmed uses HTTP POST rather than GET or I could give perhaps a more compelling example from the medical literature.We've also had MEDLINE for the last 25 years but MEDLINE on the web, accessable to the entire population, is a great benefit. To me, the question isn't whether or not to use URIs, rather how to better use URIs. Jonathan Borden The Open Healthcare Group http://www.openhealth.org
Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2001 13:24:08 UTC