TAG request: establish the relationship between URIs and Resources is many to many

To the TAG,

In an effort to cut to the chase and get some software build and 
deployed that uses RDF technology, I would like to TAG to advise on 
the structural relationship between URIs and what it is they 
identify, namely the Resources (hereafter 'things').

I offer an opinion. The relationship between URIs and things is many 
to many. One URI will be used to denote many things. A thing will be 
denoted by many URIs.

I offer a rationale for this opinion. It's preferable to constrain 
the relationship to one to many, as this results in simpler, 
deterministic software. However I believe the notion that a URI only 
ever identifies one thing, however appealing, is fictitious, and an 
shackle on the semantic web that will lead to unscalable systems and 
fringe benefits, in much the same way backlinking sidelined 
hypertext until the web was invented without the backlinking 
constraint. the many to one relationship will not hold, nor is 
manageable across the number of authorities the web encapsulates, 
leading to ambiguous and outright inconsistent data sets shared 
across a gloabl system that is by definition not architected to be 
resilient to inconsistency. Hence I encourage to TAG to advise the 
relationship is many to many.

I have no affilations currently with any W3C activities.

regards
Bill de hÓra

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2003 07:26:26 UTC