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Re: many-to-many

• To: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Subject: Re: many-to-many
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 13:31:00 -0800
• Cc: Seairth Jacobs <seairth@s...>,xml-dev <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <200301241940.OAA24799@m...>
• References: <200301241940.OAA24799@m...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

John Cowan wrote:

> That model works well when you are just fetching representations for human
> or machine consumption.  When you want to make *assertions*, though, you
> have a problem.  Consider http://www.heritage.org/images/shakespeare.jpg .
> Now does that refer to *Shakespeare*, the playwright who was born on
> or about 1564-04-23?  Or does it refer to a *picture of Shakespeare*,
> which is in JPEG format and contains 176 by 190 pixels?  And if it refers
> to one of them, how does one refer to the other?

Exactly.  If you're just surfing, who cares, because your mind will 
disambiguate.  If you're trying to build a KR system, you have to either

(a) have a built-in way to disambiguate between what the resource "is" 
and what it's "about"
(b) use different names.

I prefer (b), and would encourage people to use something like 
http://www.heritage.org/Shakespeare for the person and the URI above for 
the picture.  Not only is this easier to understand, I'm unconvinced 
that there's a good universal way to attack the (a) problem, which has 
historically been a pretty severe rat-hole. -Tim

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