Re: resources and URIs

----- Original Message -----
From: "ext Graham Klyne" <GK@ninebynine.org>
To: "pat hayes" <phayes@ihmc.us>; "Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org>
Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
Sent: 18 July, 2003 14:56
Subject: Re: resources and URIs


>
> Noting your ongoing debate, I wondered if something that Dan said [1]
might
> be a bridge to useful progress...
>
> At 17:51 16/07/03 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
> >Well, it's pretty close... try taking 'identify' to mean
> >"denote in many/most useful interpretations".
>
> and ...
>
> At 23:34 17/07/03 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> >Example1.
> >
> >A dog bounds into the room. Tim says, "Here, Fido!" to the dog, and says
> >"Pat, meet my dog, Fido" to Pat. Tim plays with th edog. Tim asks Pat,
> >"Pat, would please take Fido for a walk?"
> >Pat takes the dog for a walk.  The name seems to have been unambiguously
> >associated with te same dog in both there minds.
>
> I think the point here is that the name here is associated with something
> in each mind similar enough that doing the action of "taking it for a
walk"
> has the same observable outcome.
>
> Fido might be interpreted to denote the dog, or to denote a collection of
> fleas that live on the dog, but to take "Fido" for a walk amounts to the
> same thing.

Hmmm... dangerous.

Pat's behavior may become variable. He might simply have
been lazy the first time, and choose to use the dog as a
vehicle for taking the fleas for the walk. The next time
he might very well brush the fleas off the dog and take
only them for the walk -- thus revealing the ambiguity.

I hope that denotations can be expressed more clearly,
either in RDF/OWL or natural language, than by guesswork.

Patrick

Received on Friday, 18 July 2003 11:07:20 UTC