Re: Information resources?

/ ht@inf.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson) was heard to say:
| Norman Walsh <Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM> writes:
|
|> I have used the URI 'http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot' to
|> identify the Hoary Marmot (really, I'm serious[1]). If I GET a
|> representation of that URI, I get some RDF that tells me things about
|> the Marmot. I consider that data to be a representation of the
|> physical creature.
|>
|> Assertions that http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is a web
|> page or has a particular creator or last modified date or
|> what-have-you are inconsistent.
|
| This seems to me the crux -- on what basis do you assert they are
| inconsistent?

I'm appealing to your experience. Given two assertions:

  http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is_a "Hoary Marmot"
  http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is_a "web page"

Your undertanding of what it means to be a Hoary Marmot (in particular
that all such things belong to each of the following classes of
things: marmots, rodents, gnawing animals, placental mammals,
eutherian mammals, mammals, vertibrates, craniates, chordates,
animals, organisms, living things, animate things, and physical
objects) will lead you to conclude that those assertions are
inconsistent.

I could have made some additional statements to express explicitly
that the set of hoary marmots and the set of web pages are disjoint,
but I didn't bother.

| How might I have figure that out for myself? 

You, the human being, relies on wetware. A machine is going to rely
on...something else. The trick is not to make assertions that you
can't prove, I suppose.

| How might
| my search engine have figure it out for _itself_?

I have no idea.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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