I notice the following on Libby Miller's weblog, referring to the RSS+events module.
I'm really pleased to see that it's been updated so that the event is a 'thing' in itself and isn't confused with the webpage describing it … [Libby Miller]
Which I am noting here mostly so I can find it again if necessary, but also because hints at something which has been bugging me about RDF, but which is (I think) more cleanly dealt with in Topic Maps.
If you use an URI to represent a non-addressable object like a person, then it better not be the URI of an addressable object (like a web page) because if it is then you can't distinguish between statements about the person and statements about the web page. In Topic Maps you can talk about the resource at a URI and the thing indicated by a URI unambiguously, so for example I could make statements about my official web page and also make statements using the URI of that page as a subject indicator for me.
Ah. In her previous post Libby comments more fully:
My experiments with RDFical and RSS 1.0 use foaf:topic to separate the RSS 1.0 feed item (with its url) from the event itself (which might have a homepage, but is not itself a url). This issue is analogous to people and urls. People are not webpages though they may have homepages. Events are not webpages, though they may have homepages and other pages about them.…
Chris was arguing that the rss link did not have to be a url, but could be a non-url uri, and therefore not confusable with a webpage. Ok, that seems more reasonable, although I worry that people will in fact tend to use actual urls of webpages, especially because that's what RSS is designed for. [Libby Miller]
I think that when it comes to naming models the worry expressed here isn't an issue. There is no existing tradition of having a well defined web page per model (not distinct from modelling tool) or model implementation, so a format which declares that models shall be given URIs which are not URLs of web-retrievable objects should be fine.
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