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Re: [ontology-summit] URIs for quantities, units and scales

To: "Ontology Summit 2009" <ontology-summit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Peter F Brown (Pensive SA)" <peter@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:12:45 +0100
Message-id: <1B2253B0359130439EA571FF30251AAE118569@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> If you don't do your homework in defining the meaning of any symbols 
> at the end of that URI rainbow, it'll just be garbage.
> The GIGO principle for computer systems has not been repealed by the 
> Semantic Web.    (01)

Agree up to a point. No-one (except W3C...sigh...) is seriously
suggesting that the URI somehow represents the semantics of what it's
pointing to but having URIs maintained by some "authority" can at least
deal with a large part of the tedium that we see coming out of so-called
semantic web technologies, by providing a common handle for talking
about the same thing. Let someone else, or indeed anyone else, go and
create reams of web pages explaining what the thing identified actually
*is* (I've no idea what a ream of web pages would look like however).    (02)

By using the same identifier for some thing, whatever different parties
might call it ("avocat" (uid:12345) is the same as "avocado"
(uid:12345), is surely a step forward from having to do painful
inferencing such as "when I use the term 'avocat' in the context of some
French text and discussion about fruit, rather than about the legal
system, it is more likely than not that I mean the same as your English
word 'avocado' rather than 'lawyer'" - we seem to love chewing up lots
of bandwidth with the latter approach, with very dubious results, rather
than - heaven forfend - accepting any authority for issuing an
identifier.    (03)

Peter    (04)

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