The bourne identity of a web resource
Aldo Gangemi, Valentina Presutti · 2006
One of the main strength of the web is that it realizes the goal of allowing any party of its global community to share information with any other party. This has been achieved by making use of a unique and uniform mechanism of identification, the URI (Universal Resource Identifiers). Web applications such as search engines have been built up on this mechanism. Although URIs succeed when used for retrieving resources on the web, their suitability as a way for identifying any kind of thing, for example resources which are not on the web, is not guaranteed. We investigate the meaning of identity of a resource and how it can be modeled in order to be implemented on the web. In particular, we use an ontological approach for modeling the problem, and discuss some possible solutions. We describe the concept of resource from the web domain point of view, using an ontology of Information Objects, built under DOLCE and some of its modular extensions. In particular, we formalize some concepts of resource and distinguish them from the concept of a generic entity. We finally propose a formal pattern for the categorization of resources.