Question about IS

OK, I made it through (most of) the MT and one question especially
lingers in my mind (along with a faint buzzing and some dark 
subtle whisperings... but that's probably not the MT's fault ;-)

The question is about the mapping IS. As it has been pointed
out, the MT (apparently) allows for there to actually be multiple, 
disjunct members of the vocabulary V (i.e. URIs) which map via IS to
the very same resource node. Or have I missed something right off
the bat?

In your example 1.4 of 'Thing 1' and 'Thing 2' (which as you
will recall tend to make quite a mess of things when one's 
mother is out ;-)  you define two graph nodes '1' and '2'
and you map the labels (presumably equating to URIs) 'a'
and 'b' both to node '1'.

But how does that happen in reality since 

(a) the MT does not define any equivalence between non-identical
    URIs so how does it know that both 'a' and 'b' should both
    map to '1'?

(b) graph nodes may only have one label (right?) so how can
    node '1' be labeled both 'a' and 'b'?

(c) labels (either URIs or literals) are the only means by
    which we may refer to graph nodes (right?) so just how
    is the node '1' referred to as node '1' such that the
    mappings via IS can even be defined?

Just how do we end up with what is essentially a single
node with two labels, 'a' and 'b'?

Or do we have two levels of representation here, where 'a',
'b', and 'c' are the labeled nodes in the graph and '1' and
'2' are "something else" (e.g. nodes at a higher level of
abstraction)

Or have I just totally misunderstood the whole enchilada?

Thanks,

Patrick

--
Patrick Stickler                      Phone:  +358 3 356 0209
Senior Research Scientist             Mobile: +358 50 483 9453
Nokia Research Center                 Fax:    +358 7180 35409
Visiokatu 1, 33720 Tampere, Finland   Email:  patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Thursday, 4 October 2001 16:59:20 UTC