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RE: many-to-many

• To: 'Joe English' <jenglish@f...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: many-to-many
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 14:51:27 -0600

That's my opinion as well.  By saying a resource 
is any object with identity, there is a convenient 
fiction of setness.  The resource ends up being 
the braces.  Identity is an assigned property of 
the function of identification, not an intrinsic 
property in this case.  But I think the term became 
necessary because otherwise, it is difficult to use 
the term Identifier given that there is no real object 
there.

But that doesn't fix the problem.  As I said before, 
the issue comes up in the context of RDF attempting 
to use URIs for one to one mappings.  It would seem 
that if they are using a name which must map, they 
must be responsible for specifying the selector 
mechanism which as you point out on the Web, is 
the protocol technology (eg, HTTP).  What does 
RDF do at that stage of identifying?

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Joe English [mailto:jenglish@f...]

I'll offer a counteropinion:

There is no such thing as a "Resource".

URIs don't Identify anything on their own.
Other technologies (RDF, XMLNS, HTTP, etc.)
*use* URIs to Identify things.  The nature of
the thing Identified depends on who's doing
the Identification.

If we dispose of the inconvenient fiction 
of a "Resource", most of the metaphysical hooey 
surrounding URIs goes away.

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