The Garden of Eden:
[2:19] And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof….[1]
As the number of Adams and Eves multiplied, so did the names of things.
Multiple names for the same things, different things with the same names.
Ambiguity had entered the world.
The Semantic Web Garden of Eden sought to banish ambiguity:
…by an RDF statement having…URIrefs are used to identify not only the subject of the original statement, but also the predicate and object, instead of using the words “creator” and “John Smith” [2]
As the number of URIs multipled, so did the URIs of things.
Multiple URIs for the same things, different things with the same URIs.
Ambiguity remains in the world.
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[1] Genesis 2:19
[2] RDF Primer, 2.2 RDF Model, http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/