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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: URIs are simply names was: Re: "Abstract" URIs
 John Cowan <jcowan@r...> writes: > if someone queries the semantic web "Does > http://www.ccil.org/self.xtm#self contain 32 > characters?" the answer would be "No", since John > Cowan is not representable in characters. That's right. John Cowan is *a* character. (:^) But seriously, folks, in Topic Map-land, a single addressable character, in a single specific place, could be used as a surrogate for John Cowan. > TM and RDF are equivalent in power. Yes and no. Since TMs can be expressed in RDF, you're right, and what you say is strictly true. However, it takes a lot of RDF statements to make a single TM assertion. So the normal, predictable way of understanding your statement that "TM and RDF are equivalent in power" would be incorrect. I would argue that, in the realm of the Semantic Web and collaborative work, the TM-enhanced way of using RDF offers a certain vital power that RDF by itself does not offer. TMs offer a way for semantic nets to be self-maintaining in such a way that everything that might someday be regarded as substantive has already been reified. This means that the addresses of knowledge-bearing relationships don't pop into existence when somebody decides to say something about them. And that means that, when the address of a piece of knowledge is expressed in terms of the arc traversals that get you there, such address expressions don't lose their value just because someone added knowledge to the net. It's hard to overstate the importance and value of this difference between the TM way of using RDF to make assertions, and the just-plain-vanilla RDF way of making assertions. [Jonathan Borden:] > > The term "subject" is in grave danger of becoming > > as overloaded as "resource" > "[A] subject is anything whatsoever, regardless of > whether it exists or has any other specific > characteristics, about which anything whatsoever may > be asserted by any means whatsoever." > --the XTM specification > So a subject is a resource and vice versa. The Web world's omnivalent use of the term "resource" has created a monumental level of confusion among * a piece of information, * the piece of information at a particular address, * the ideas the piece of information conveys, * the non-information thing that a piece of information at a particular address is used as a surrogate for, and * the information or non-information thing that a piece of information at no particular address (i.e., a name) is used as a surrogate for. These things are all different from each other, and if we really want to communicate with each other, these differences matter very much. Topic Maps makes a big distinction between "subject" and "resource." In Topic Maps land, these terms are not equivalent. -- Steve Steven R. Newcomb, Consultant srn@c... voice: +1 972 359 8160 fax: +1 972 359 0270 1527 Northaven Drive Allen, Texas 75002-1648 USA 
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