URIs and the Semantic Web: Magic bullet or red herring?
Speaker: Henry Thompson
Institution:
CRC Language Technology Group
University of Edinburgh
Half-time member of W3C Team
Abstract:
The ultimate goal of the Semantic Web project is to exploit the synergy of web-scale knowledge representation. The use of URIs as the identifiers in Semantic Web KR languages is the foundation on which the plausibility of this goal rests. In this talk I will start with a careful exposition of the official story about URIs, according to the relevant IETF RFCs as well as the W3C's Technical Architecture Group's Architecture of the World Wide Web. I will go on to outline the use of URIs in Semantic Web languages, and to summarise the discussion at the recent Identify, Reference, and the Web workshop on this and related topics. I will conclude with some speculation on the way forward.