¥In general,
overloading is harmless when it is possible to figure out from the information
available at the time which of the various referents is intended by that
particular use of the name. Often this is easy when the referents are in different
ontological categories, as with a person and a web page.
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¥One way to
think about overloading is that an overloaded term denotes a single Ôcomplex
thingÕ which has all the usual referents as parts or facets,
selected by implicit selectors. This often works surprisingly well:
for example, the syntactic of logic (and RDF and OWL) is enough to ÔselectÕ the
appropriate referent in the CL and IKL formal semantics. For people and
websites it seems to work, also, for most purposes: I am not affected by an
attempt to http GET me instead of my website, and my website isnÕt going to
spend any of my salary. Inference is not affected by ambiguity of
reference, of course; and the normal infrastructures of interaction with people
and websites are sufficiently robust to disambiguate this kind of
overloading when they need to be disambiguated.
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