Identity of Resources and Entities on the Web [chapter]

Valentina Presutti, Aldo Gangemi
Advances in Semantic Web and Information Systems  
One of the main strengths of the web is that it allows any party of its global community to share information with any other party. This goal has been achieved by making use of a unique and uniform mechanism of identification, the URI (Universal Resource Identifiers). Although URIs succeed when used for retrieving resources on the web, their suitability as a way for identifying any kind of things, for example resources that are not on the web, is not guaranteed. In this article we investigate
more » ... e meaning of identity of a web resource, and how the current situation as well as existing and possible future improvements can be modeled and implemented on the web. In particular, we propose an ontology, IRE, which provides a formal way to model both the problem and the solution spaces. IRE describes the concept of resource from the web viewpoint, by reusing an ontology of Information Objects, built on top of DOLCE+ and its extensions. In particular, we formalize the concept of web resource, as distinguished from the concept of a generic entity, and how those and other concepts are related e.g. by different proxy for relations. Based on the analysis formalized in IRE, we propose a formal pattern for modeling and comparing different solutions to the identity problem.
doi:10.4018/978-1-60566-992-2.ch007 fatcat:566xlsabj5hhjejzn7z7qefcsi