Meaning is Context Relative, Not Identifiers
Phil asked for clarification on a previous post, so hopefully with some sleep in me I can elaborate a bit more. I think I was trying to say that the concept of weight can be modeled in many different ways. This includes different ontological descriptions for weight, where weight can be identified using the same or different URI.
Take, for example, the URI http://example.org/xyz. You can say that:
<http ://example.org/xyz> a :Animal.
and I can say
<http ://example.org/xyz> a :Car.
The context here is Who Said What. What’s not up for question is that there is some Resource identified by <http ://example.org/xyz>, and that when we use that identifier, we are talking about the same thing.
For the semantic web to succeed, and this might be your point all along, the environment must be able to cope with the above situation (where you think the thing is an animal, and I think it’s a car) . This is difficult because of the Open World assumption, no doubt about it. For all the reasoner knows, something can be a :Animal and a :Car. It’s up to the authors of the ontologies to say that :Animal owl:disjoint :Car.
Even though the Open World assumption exists, URI’s still identify one thing. Now, whatever meaning you assign to that thing is your own. It’s the meaning that is context relative, not the identifier for the thing.
March 9th, 2006 at 1:10 am
[…] Seth posted a response to my ‘global identifiers don’t scale’ post that I didn’t expect. His point is that it is the meaning that isn’t consistent across the semantic web, not the identifiers. I agree with him about meaning being inconsistent, but it’s the distinction that confuses me - in my posts I’ve conflated identity with meaning, but Seth asserts that they are different things. He says: “Take, for example, the URI <http://example.org/xyz>. You can say that: […]
March 9th, 2006 at 7:31 am
But isnt it absurd or at least meaningless to believe we are talking about the same “uri-wise” thing iff we put “it” into completely different classes? What does such an identity establish at all? I think it would make much more sense to try to establish identity the other way round by coaligning point with similiar meaning.
March 9th, 2006 at 9:09 am
I’ve responded to Stefan’s question. Hopefully that will continue the conversation.
June 28th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
I agree with him about meaning being inconsistent