Last modified: 2014-09-17 09:42:39 UTC
There should be a "sameAs" to track external URIs refering to the same external entity. This would then replace a lot of identificators that are now partly functional (and otherwise complete mess) and would later on allow enriching the insite descriptions by doing prefetch of data from those external descriptions. Ref owl:sameAs for semantics.
I don't think this would be a good idea. owl:sameAs has expremely strong semantics; if two reasoures from different ontologies are connected using sameAs, but the ontologies are (even slightly) incompatible, this will poison any logic system that tries to process them together. Also, this would be prone to abuse in the form of people adding URLS that just point to resources describing the same thing, as opposed to being URIs for the same thing. I think having a catch all property called "also described by" (or some such) would be preferrable.
Discussion about this on Wikidata: http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Generic#Same_as and OWL standard about equivalence: http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/#Equality_and_Inequality_of_Individuals
After some more thinking about this and Daniel's comment I agree.
What Daniel describe is rdfs:seeAlso, not owl:sameAs. Those two are quite different even if they seem similar. I think this again centers around a model that isn't quite what it should be. Perhaps it is time to rethink the whole model and what it is capable of, it seems like it creates a system that is to different to be really usefull.
