Re: article on URIs, is this material that can be used by the SWEO IG?

Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) scripsit:

> 3. There is a third good solution, which involves framing the problem
> differently.  It is what I called the "shadow ontology" approach:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2006Jan/0171.html
> 
> This approach involves designing your ontology to *indirectly* refer
> to something that is not a web document, by use of a URI for a web
> document that describes that thing.

This is what in the Topic Maps world is called a subject indicator:
a document that is about the actual resource.  For example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare is a subject indicator for
Shakespeare.  The Topic Maps glossary defines a subject indicator as
"a[n information] resource that is intended by the topic map author to
provide a positive, unambiguous indication of the identity of a subject."

Note that an information resource, just like a non-information resource,
can have associated subject indicators: the XML 1.0 Recommendation has
a basic URI of http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml , but the document referred
to as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML is a plausible subject indicator
for it.

There is also the concept of a "published subject indicator", which
is a subject indicator containing (minimally) something like this:

	<authority> intends <URI> to be a published
	subject indicator for "concept".

Typically, of course, other information is present as well.

-- 
John Cowan  cowan@ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to [Sam], a grey-clad
moving hill.  Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes,
but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him
does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are
but memories of his girth and his majesty.  --"Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit"

Received on Wednesday, 30 May 2007 22:59:38 UTC