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.

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