It's handy that the "database" is a self-contained package that can be updated using any text editor, emailed, read directly from a file system, or served by any web server. But it's awkward to share the work of updating with other people or to isolate and edit parts of the file as it grows. When we convert to a database-backed web application in order to solve these problems, we trade away the convenience of the file-oriented approach. Can we have our cake and eat it too?
If two different RDF files (eg. FOAF documents) are talking about the same thing but don't use exactly the same URI when mentioning that thing, how are our poor stupid computers supposed to be able to understand? In the real world, we want to write RDF documents (eg. for FOAF) about things that we've not yet agreed on common identifiers for. This is one of the core problems we've had to address in FOAF.
eggand you say
eggswe are both talking about
http://example.com/food#egg
. I know that. You know that. Computers are too stupid to figure it out without a high degree of
hand-holding.
But then Canada would become a donut-shaped country.
Well, given the popularity of Tim Horton's it's only a matter of time.