¥What makes
this kind of consideration particularly acute is the view that URIs should
be global and eternal in scope. This makes things worse. It
means that if there is any possibility of some such ontological
distinction being made by anyone, anywhere, at any time, then in
order to avoid ambiguity of reference, the URI must make all the
potentially disambiguating decisions ahead of time, as it were: which is of
course manifestly impossible, because there is always the possibility
of some new distinction being made later.
¥
¥It is
impossible to achieve unambiguous global reference of names by using
descriptions. So we should not set out to attempt it, nor pose it as a goal
or a Ôgood practiceÕ. The presence of the Web does
not alter the nature of description or of reference, so the
conclusion applies there also.