Phil Dawes’ Stuff » Blog Archive » Global identifier schemes don’t scale II
Phil continues his thoughts with the assertion that
>As the system gets big and less consistent, the global identifiers cannot guarantee to unambiguously identify things across the system
Immediately I don't agree (quite respectfully). Phil, are you saying that a URI does not identify one and only one Resource?
I want to follow the rest of your reasoning, but I can't get past this point.
Perhaps you are confusing identity with meaning? I agree that the semantic web allows for ambiguous meanings for things, and that there is no way to declare that a Resource *is* one single thing (where *is* means, *is an instance of a class*).
But, and please elaborate on this one, a URI allows us to talk about the same thing without any ambiguity. Of course, we may describe the thing with completely different views/contexts/words but at least we're talking about the same thing.
I want to get to the rest of your post, but until I hear why a URI doesn't uniquely identify a Resource, I'm stuck in confusion.
>As the system gets big and less consistent, the global identifiers cannot guarantee to unambiguously identify things across the system
Immediately I don't agree (quite respectfully). Phil, are you saying that a URI does not identify one and only one Resource?
I want to follow the rest of your reasoning, but I can't get past this point.
Perhaps you are confusing identity with meaning? I agree that the semantic web allows for ambiguous meanings for things, and that there is no way to declare that a Resource *is* one single thing (where *is* means, *is an instance of a class*).
But, and please elaborate on this one, a URI allows us to talk about the same thing without any ambiguity. Of course, we may describe the thing with completely different views/contexts/words but at least we're talking about the same thing.
I want to get to the rest of your post, but until I hear why a URI doesn't uniquely identify a Resource, I'm stuck in confusion.