Re: Reification quoting in RDF/N3 was: A note comparingConceptual Graphs and RDF/Semantic Web

> > Please, let's keep things straight here. Bill is a human being.
>
>Yep... I already pointed out "that was a typo".
>
> > In fact, most human beings don't even have associated URIs,
>
>I know.. but we can talk about properties of humans, and if we bring all of
>these properties under one node, one URI, then we can use that node to
>refer to when we want to re-use those properties. Does that make sense now?

That makes logical sense, but I don't honestly think it makes what 
might be called Web sense. That is, I don't think that we can ever 
expect that all the information about anything is going to be 
gathered together in one place. (Who is "we" exactly, in your 
sentence above?) That seems quite contrary to the spirit of the Web, 
in fact. More seriously, it is likely to give highly misleading 
conclusions if relied upon; for example, census data  based on the 
assumption that people are 1:1 with home pages would give highly 
skewed results.

>It's a similar thing with HTML - my homepage isn't me, but it does have
>(useful?) information about me.

Yes, but surely it doesnt have *all* the useful information about 
you; and, more to the point, what about all the people who don't have 
a home page? Surely we ought to be able to at least *refer* to them? 
Some of them might even be mentioned in an ontology somewhere. I know 
of at least one world-famous theoretical physicist who doesn't even 
have an email address, let alone a home page, and he's not even in a 
third-world country.

Pat Hayes

---------------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC					(850)434 8903   home
40 South Alcaniz St.			(850)202 4416   office
Pensacola,  FL 32501			(850)202 4440   fax
phayes@ai.uwf.edu 
http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes

Received on Friday, 19 January 2001 19:43:23 UTC