Re: Identifying Things (on the semantic web)

Sandro Hawke wrote:
> The problem: How do you talk about something when you don't already
> share with your audience a common identifier for it?
> 
> Proposed answer: Find a document which
>   - can be identified to your audience
>   - contains some text which, in the document, identifies
>     the thing in a way your audience understands.
> 
> Then identify the thing with the pair (document identifier, text of
> thing-identifier).   And if we use URI-references as document
> identifiers, we have a pretty good system.    (URIs would work, but
> it's easier to find a unique identifier in big documents if we allow
> fragments.)

soubd idea

> Examples: I can be identified quite clearly as: "The thing called
> 'Sandro Hawke' on the web at http://www.w3.org/People/Sandro/".
> And a "URI-reference" can be identified as "The thing called
> 'URI-reference' in http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt".
> 
> I think people have been trying to approximate this by using
> identifiers like
>    http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt#URI-reference
> but that's a poor approximation because that construct already has a
> different meaning.

It *may* already have some meaning, depending on the mime type of the data retrieved through the prefixed URI. But I think using fragments is a natural way of implementing your idea.

I guess some more appropriate syntax would be

  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt#hrd(URI-reference)

where "hrd" stands for "human readable description".

Of course, according to RFC-2396, a fragment identifier's meaning depends on the mime type ;
can we define a fragment class valid over mime type */* ?

  Pierre-Antoine Champin
  

-- 
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the
universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
(Bill Watterson -- Calvin & Hobbes)

Received on Monday, 22 January 2001 08:15:20 UTC