On 11/11/10 11:34 AM, Nathan wrote:
Kingsley Idehen wrote:
On 11/11/10 10:00 AM, Nathan wrote:
Kingsley Idehen wrote:
On 11/11/10 9:00 AM, David Booth wrote:
On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 07:23 +0100, Jiří Procházka wrote:
[ . . . ]
I think it is flawed trying to enforce "URI == 1 thing"
Exactly right. The "URI == 1 thing" notion is myth #1 in "Resource
Identity and Semantic Extensions: Making Sense of Ambiguity":
http://dbooth.org/2010/ambiguity/paper.html#myth1
It is a good *goal*, but it is inherently unachievable.
Are you implying that a URI -- an Identifier -- doesn't have a
Referent (singular)?
http://kingsley.idehen.name/dataspace/person/kidehen#this does not
name you, it's not a name for you, or the name for you.
It's a name (identifier for the purpose of referencing) of "#this,
as described by
http://kingsley.idehen.name/dataspace/person/kidehen"; and how
"#this, as described by
http://kingsley.idehen.name/dataspace/person/kidehen"; is ultimately
interpreted to be, depends entirely on context and application.
> If so, what is the URI identifying?
It's identifying, or referring to, "x, as described by y" and what
the description identifies is open to interpretation and context (a
human? an agent? a father? a trusted-man? a holder of X? a bearer of
Y?).
Nathan,
In your response, I don't sense (in any way) the plurality that I
sense in David's comments -- for which I sought clarification.
I interpret David's response (maybe inaccurately) as saying:
http://kingsley.idehen.name/dataspace/person/kidehen#this, isA URI
that can have > 1 Referent. None of your expressions infer that.
AFAICT, it's more Man != Father != TrustedMan, so dependent on how you
interpret the resource you will come to different conclusions as to
what it identifies (x the Man or x the Father or x the TrustedMan, and
so on), those things are all differentFrom each other, so thus it
names different things in different contexts - but of course it's just
one thing which can be classified in different ways.
Still no Referent plurality there re. Identifiers.
Or, perhaps he was more referring to that fact that </Toucan> does
identify two entirely different things, not one thing that can be
classified in two different ways.
I'd suggest "URI == 1 described thing, description open to
interpretation" as opposed to "URI == X things" - but reality we are
faced with is that we need to handle both.
Might be missing something..
I'll drop and rough draft poem under a separate heading :-)
Nathan
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
