- From: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 23:12:03 -0400
- To: www-talk@w3.org
- Cc: uri@w3.org
> * Many-to-One ...
>
> * One-to-One ...
>
> It's a fairly fine distinction, I know, but I'm not sure that it's
> universally agreed to. What do people think? I'm interested to see if
> there are substantial differences in the URI, REST, Web architecture
> and Semantic Web communities.
I may be able to speak for the Semantic Web community in this: if you
want to use URIs to name things like coffee makers and stars (as we
do), only a Many-to-One relationship could possibly work. Anything
which exists (whatever that means) independent of a particular
authority can sensibly be given different names by different
authorities, and to imagine that it could not be.... to imagine that
there is at most one URI which identifies the Sun.... seems pretty
unworkable.
Of course I also see that when you think of URIs (especially working
HTTP ones) as communication end-points (or, as I've written,
ResponsePoints [1]) they are very, very close to one-to-one. Then it
really is splitting hairs (in the neighborhood of "http://www.w3.org/"
identifying the same thing as "http://www.w3.org") to see whether they
are 1-1 or 1-many.
-- sandro
[1] http://esw.w3.org/topic/ResponsePoint
Received on Sunday, 7 September 2003 23:12:25 UTC