[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
Jonathan Borden, or the avatar of him at jborden@a..., wrote: > A URI is simply a name for a thing, whatever that thing may be. Fair enough. But one and the same URI should not name two different things. I and my home page are two different things, with different lifetimes, belonging to different object classes, with different properties, with different values of the same properties. If we speak of Lockean identity (the identity of indiscernibles), then my home page and I are extremely discernible, and as such, extremely not identical. Anyhow, I too now have a URI: http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/self.xtm#self This points to a topic element in a topic map. The subject indicators for this topic are my home page and my two principal mailboxes. So any topic element in any other topic map that shares at least one of these subject indicators is also a valid URI for me. > URIs are names. The point being made is that what they name is NOT the > literal series of characters returned by a GET, rather the URI names a > _resource_ which might be anything thing that has a name. What is > returned by a GET is simply a description of the actual resource > (other wording is a 'representation of the resource'). Again, fair enough. But the use of "description" is an equivoque: the HTML you can GET from http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/ is a representation of a certain resource of type "hyperdocument". It is not a representation of another resource of type "Homo sapiens". It does not even, as it happens, very well describe that Homo sapiens instance. > URIs are names. The point is that names, to be truly useful, should not refer to distinct referents. It is nothing but a nuisance that "James Carter" might refer to either a mathematician at UCLA or a former president of the United States. > Jonathan (note new email address -- which refers to the same person as > jborden@m...) Your two email addresses *refer* to distinct mailboxes: it is not all one (at least eventually, if not immediately) whether I send mail to jborden@m... or jborden@a.... They are *associated*, using any of a variety of properties such as "mailboxOf", "ownedBy", or "subjectIndicatorOf", with you yourself, Jonathan Borden. What the URI of Jonathan Borden might be, we do not yet know. If a topic for you appeared in some topic map, then we would have a URI for you (an XPointer into the topic map) and a criterion for determining if other such URIs also refer to you. -- John Cowan <jcowan@r...> http://www.reutershealth.com I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith. --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_
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