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Re: [ontolog-forum] OWL and lack of identifiers

To: Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>
Cc: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 01:01:36 -0400
Message-id: <46230330.5060200@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Pat,    (01)

There are very intelligent people working on the W3C, and
they are certainly as knowledgeable about these issues as
anybody could be.    (02)

 > But in this sense it is *necessarily* a location identifier,
 > so its pointless to worry about how to change that.    (03)

I have no desire to change it.  But it would make things
clearer if they just said explicitly that it is a location
identifier, not a content identifier.    (04)

 > Look at the header of any W3C official document, for example,
 > which has 'this version', 'last version' and 'latest version'
 > URIs. The 'latest version' URI identifies a 'moving' resource;
 > the others are fixed to particular bit-images, but even those
 > are not addresses, but rather documents. In fact, in many cases
 > they have been moved from 'active' storage to archives as the
 > W3C reorganizes its website.    (05)

That is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.  Those conventions
could be specified with a suitable language for specifying
metadata.  RDF comes to mind as a possibility.    (06)

 > A copy is not *identical* to its master. It is a copy of it.    (07)

A perfect copy (which is possible for computer data) should be
indistinguishable from the original.  Without metadata, there
would be no way to tell which was the "master".    (08)

 > Of course, many people just build websites in the easiest way,
 > which is to add a file locator to a base URI to make a new URI.
 > I confess that I do this myself quite often.    (09)

If that's what everybody does, why pretend that a URI is
anything other than a location identifier?  Each web page
can have its own metadata to specify how it should be
interpreted.    (010)

John    (011)

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