RE: reference needed

> From: Steven Gollery [mailto:sgollery@cadrc.calpoly.edu] 
> what if we're using 
> an inferencing engine to reason about RDF statements? Would 
> the engine 
> treat all occurrences of SlashURIs as referring to the thing 
> itself, or 
> would it have to try to access each SlashURI and check what 
> comes back, 
> perhaps performing different kinds of inferencing depending 
> on whether 
> the response is a "302 found" redirect or not?

It looks like that could be the case, yes.  Not good, especially
considering that there are already issues around an OWL document
importing other OWL documents when the source for those documents is
unavailable.  Suddenly we have another case of the 'meaning' of
something changing depending on whether it is possible to contact its
server at present or not.

The other approaches seem to be (a) to have complete uniformity and
accept that it is not possible to tell whether a URI refers to a thing
or a document about the thing, or (b) to have syntactically
distinguished URIs that are only used to denote things.  Speaking
entirely personally, I prefer (b) as a more expressive solution that
does not require excessive engineering - a new URI scheme (thing:...)
would be sufficient.  However, before Pat and others round on me, I'm
aware that this is considered a somewhat simplistic view :-).

		- Peter

Received on Wednesday, 4 June 2003 10:01:22 UTC