As I pointed out in Topic Maps in < 5 Minutes, topic maps take it as given that:
salt
sodium chloride
NaCl
are all legitimate identifiers for the same subject.
That is called semantic diversity. (There are more ways to identify salt but let’s stick with those for the moment.)
Contrast that with the Semantic Web, that wants to have one identifier for salt and consequently, no semantic diversity.
You may ask yourself, what happens to all the previous identifications of salt, literally thousands of different ways to identify it?
Do we have to re-write all those identifiers across the vast sweep of human literature?
Or you may ask yourself, given the conditions that lead to semantic diversity still exist, how is future semantic diversity to be avoided?
Good questions.
Or for that matter, the changing information structures and growing information structures where we are storing petabytes of data. What about semantic diversity there as well?
I don’t know.
Maybe we should ask Tim Berners-Lee, timbl @ w3.org?
*****
PS: And this is a really easy subject to identify. Just think about democracy, human rights, justice, or any of the others of thousands of subjects, all of which are works in progress.
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