¥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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