Citation indexes offer a concrete example of why blindly following the linked data mantra of creating “ URIs as names for things” (Linked Data) is a bad idea.
Science Citation Index Expanded ™ by Thompson Reuters offers coverage using citations to identify articles back to 1900. That works because the articles use citations as identifiers to reference previous articles.
There are articles available in digital form, from arXiv.org, CiteSeerX or some other digital repository. That means that they have an identifier in addition to the more traditional citation reference/identifier.
Where multiple identifiers identify the same subject, we need equivalence operators.
Where identifiers already identify subjects, we need operators that re-use those identifiers.
Ask yourself, “What good is a new set of identifiers that partially duplicates existing identifiers?”
If you think you have a good answer, please email me or reply to this post. Thanks!
URIs are very good names for corpora of web-available data. There can be no reasonable argument against using them for that purpose.
Like you, Patrick, I’ve often wondered why URIs are promoted as being useful as names for things *other* than corpora of web-available data. I just don’t get it. At one stroke, this weird idea creates several kinds of semantic ambiguity, compromising even the usefulness of the URI idea itself, by polluting the URI namespace with a stupendous number of URIs that are *not* the names of corpora of web-available data. And, as you point out, this idea actually aggravates civilization’s overall Babel problem by requiring the coining of extra names for things that already have perfectly good names. I, too, would like to see a reasonable explanation for the promotion of this weird idea, and I’ve been looking for one ever since the term “Semantic Web” (which is now called “Linked Data”) appeared on the scene.
The “reasonable explanation” I’m looking for would explain why it’s a good idea to pretend that everything we talk about is data. How, for example, is the Statue of Liberty like data? I don’t see any similarity, much less identity. Names are only useful when they *identify* things.
Comment by Steve Newcomb — June 11, 2010 @ 9:13 am