¥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.