URI crisis solved! Finally, after some ciders and an enlightening talk from Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself at the ISWC2005, we solved the URI crisis *again*. Timbl insisted on '#' hash instead of '/' slash at the end of URIs. If we agree that web URLs denote the location of a document or anything that can be represented as a document and that the fragment identifiert (anything after the '#') is just some nice and funny thing browsers to within a particular kind of documents (in HTML pages they scroll down a bit), well then we can conclude: Everything with a '#' is a URI. Thus we can link to the page dog in Wikipedia via 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog' and to the concept described in that page via 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#' or if thats illegal we use 'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#c' with a 'c' for concept. Of course, in RDF we still have to state the relationship between the two. Ah, and we can make it even cooler: 'http://en.wikipedia.org/rdf/Dog#' could refer to the concept and 'http://en.wikipedia.org/rdf/Dog' would be the location of the RDF document of the same data. Please comment!
While thinking about the right way to encode RDF generated from our Semantic Wikipedia I happened to stumble in the URI crises again. For Wikipedia, we solved it more or less, but not in general. The general solution is even simpler: URIs are symbols, RFD is the grammar (s-p-o). The meaning of URIs is completely depending on the social process around them. If I create a URI for myself, than it might have meaning for me, if millions of people agree to use the same URI for e.g. Google, then the URI means Google. It depends on the people whether it means Google, the website or Google, the company. It's not the choice of semantic web researchers. But (!) we can give good advice, what to use for what, in oder to speed up the URI-consensus process. Ah, an then is't funny: Some URIs, if you type them in your browser, show you a web page. Thats about as funny as doing a Google query on a words spelled backwards and wonder what comes up. The meaning of URIs has not more relation to the web pages that might come up than we assign them.
ReplyDeleteNow let's relax and create a quick and easy social convention to mint URIs for things and web pages. We need them!