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8/25/2002 9:32:54 PM, Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com> wrote:
>
>Identity in RDF is what the processing system makes of it. Period.
>
>Paul is right: RDF is far more about patterns than it is identity. We were
>able to design a pattern-match-based language for RDF: Versa, with no
>unnatural contortions.
OK, that makes sense. But why the years and years (literally!) of discussion
about URIs, ostensibly in order to make them more suitable for the
needs of RDF?
If RDF is a red herring in this discussion, so be it ... or if there is
an interpretation of RDF that is agnostic to the agonizing about URIs, then
clearly Simon's point about identities is irrelevant to it. But if so,
what's the big deal about whether URIs represent the identity of some abstraction
or are merely keys to retrieve data somehow associated with the abstraction?
The Web doesn't have to care, it appears to be the needs of RDF and the
semantic web that are driving that debate. If (as I suspect) you think of
"RDF" as merely a useful way of defining relationships and doing pattern
matching on those relationships, I doubt if you care about what URIs "truly"
identify either.
I would just as soon not pursue this ... Simon's original post made sense to me,
but he's not here to defend it. If it doesn't make sense to you, so be it!
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