Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

November 16, 2010

In Defense of Ambiguity

Filed under: OWL,RDF,Semantic Web,Subject Identity — Patrick Durusau @ 5:49 pm

by Patrick J. Hayes and Harry Halpin was cited in David Booth’s article so like any academic, I had to go read the cited paper. 😉

Highly recommended.

The authors conclude:

Regardless of the details, the use of any technology in Web architecture to distinguish between access and reference, including our proposed ex:refersTo and ex:describedBy, does nothing more than allow the author of a URI to explain how they would like the URI to be used. Ultimately, there is nothing that Web architecture can do to prevent a URI from being used to refer to some thing non-accessible. However, at least having a clear and coherent device, such as a few RDF predicates, would allow the distinction to be made so the author could give guidance on what they believe best practice for their URI would be. This would vastly improve the situation from where it is today, where this distinction is impossible. The philosophical case for the distinction between reference and access is clear. The main advantage of Web architecture is that there is now a de facto universal identification scheme for accessing networked resources. With the Semantic Web, we can now extend this scheme to the wide world outside the Web by use of reference. By keeping the distinction between reference and access clear, the lemons of ambiguity can be turned into lemonade. Reference is inherently ambiguous, and ambiguity is not an error of communication, but fundamental to the success of communication both on and off the Web.

Sounds like the distinction between subject locators and identifiers that topic maps made long before this paper was written.

1 Comment

  1. […] I read Halpin and others correctly, URIs identify the subjects they identify, except when they identify some […]

    Pingback by URIs and Identity « Another Word For It — November 18, 2010 @ 6:55 pm

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