Identity, Reference and the Web

A challenging workshop to be held in Edinburgh in May 2006. I've been invited today by the co-chair Harry Halpin to participate in the Program Committee. From the "Goal and Theme" section of the description.

URIs are the primary mechanism for reference and identity on the Web. To be useful, a URI must provide access to information which is sufficient to enable someone or something to uniquely identify a particular thing and the thing identified might vary between contexts. There is no doubt that as mechanisms for identifying web pages the URI has been wildly successful. Currently, URIs can also be used to identify namespaces, ontologies, and almost anything. However, important questions are the interpretation and use and meaning of URIs have been left unquestioned ...

Exactly indeed, what we are about here ... Interesting to see also Pat Hayes in the co-chairs list. I remember that quite a while ago in a private communication, Pat had stressed the fact that identity issues had been "sadly overlooked" so far by current Semantic Web technologies.