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John Cowan wrote:
> It's not about what the resource is, but about what may be
> truthfully predicated about it. Is it true to say that the size of
> "http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/vinci/joconde/joconde.jpg"; is
> 743x1155 pixels, or is it true to say that it is 77x53 cm? It can't
> be both.
There is broad consensus that it's a bad thing for there to be ambiguity
about what a URI identifies. It not only causes logical conundra, but
intellectual-property problems, indexing breakage, and is generally bad.
I just have trouble believing that the ambiguity problem is going to
be helped by asserting that URIs can't identify anything but information
sources (fuzzily defined amid much hand-waving, and ignoring the many
counter-examples, such as HTTP-controlled robots), or that more
generally URIs identify this but can't identify that, for nearly any
values of "this" and "that". The only way to deal with the ambiguity
problem is by fighting entropy the way we normally do, with the
application of discipline and intelligence and organization. Not by fiat.
I had held the hope that one of the things the Semantic Web would be
good for would be to enable me to make useful machine-readable
statements along the lines of "this resource is just a JPEG of my cute
cat" and "this resource serves as a placeholder for the W3C in my KR
system". But Pat Hayes et al tell me I'm all wrong. Oh well.
--
Cheers, Tim Bray
(ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)
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![http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/vinci/joconde/joconde.jpg"](http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/vinci/joconde/joconde.jpg"){kind=link}