[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: many-to-many

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: many-to-many
• From: Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@r...>
• Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 01:25:28 -0500
• In-reply-to: <r01050400-1023-581C43602F0611D78F1A0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• Organization: Red Bridge Interactive, Inc.
• References: <r01050400-1023-581C43602F0611D78F1A0003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]>
• User-agent: KMail/1.4.3

On Thursday 23 January 2003 02:10 pm, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> >I offer an opinion. The relationship between URIs and things is many
> >to many. One URI will be used to denote many things. A thing will be
> >denoted by many URIs.
. . .
> At first I thought this was off the wall, and it may yet prove so.  On
> the other hand, I didn't have much difficulty coming up with cases where
> this makes sense, and they weren't necessarily perverse.

I think a lot of this boils down to context. People ask "what does this URI 
mean?" or "what does this URI represent?" and often the answer is often "it 
depends", where any number of different variables cause variability.

One place RDF (or somesuch) can be useful, is to help establish the context 
where a URI, in a particular context, *does* equate to one thing. 
Unfortunately, the protocols don't help much... we don't many mechanisms for 
passing the context down to the protocol level, which is why we keep banging 
our head over wanting a particular representation, and only ever being able 
to get a resource. ETag isn't all that helpful either.

• References:
  • many-to-many
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Processing instruction guidelines
• Next by Date: Re: Processing instruction guidelines
• Previous by thread: Re: many-to-many
• Next by thread: RE: many-to-many
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread