This Post Is Ambiguous
When was the last time you had an unambiguous discussion?
In which Roy Fielding asks why the Semantic Web has a requirement that URIs identify a resource unambiguously?
I believe the whole attempt to make a distinction between a “document” and a “non-information resource” is just way too complicated for most users. All this business of redirecting the client from the non-information resource to a document that describes the resource seems like a hack. I understand the problem (does the URI refer to the Thing or the Document About The Thing?) and it’s complicated. Take the link I used to point you, the loyal reader, to more information about Roy Fielding. I used http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/ which is some home page for Roy. Is that link pointing to The Man or The Home Page?
My answer? Both. And the semantic web needs to deal with that unambiguity. As far as I can tell, it can. Since anyone can publish metadata about anything on the web, there’s nothing un-web about saying that “http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/ is a Home Page” and also “http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/ is a representation for Roy Fielding” It’s all about context.
Human deal with this all the time. Take, for example, my name. You can look at “Seth Ladd” as either a string of characters, which form words that have some meaning, or you can look at “Seth Ladd” as an identifier for The Man. Humans are good at noticing when “Seth Ladd” means The Man or The String of Characters. The semantic web will need to deal with this very same ambiguity.
February 24th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
In my opinion, the distinction is necessary. The Semantic Web was designed because machines really sucks in some tasks that humans do all the time.
Unambigous resource identifiers are much more simple in some scenarios. If you have a URI that identifies both a person and a homepage, you can’t say in the same context that you love the person, but hate his homepage. That’s a huge problem.
Even two very similar documents, like a homepage in HTML 4.01 and the same homepage written in XHTML 1.1 can lead to problems if you don’t assign different URIs to them. You won’t be able to create a statement determining that document being both XHTML and HTML, since the two DOCTYPES are incompatible.