[rdfweb-dev] mbox as unambiguous

[Joe Tennis]

Greetings all,

Here it is, my first dumb question/comment :)

So, I may have the definition of "unambiguous" wrong. Yes, I've read 
the words at 
http://www.daml.org/2001/03/reference.html#UnambigousProperty-def and 
they don't help me much.

Unambiguous means to me "Can be trusted without question or 
confusion. Has only one meaning and represents one and only one noun" 
Does that mean that it's a "key", in database parlance? The sentence 
"Furthermore it is a 'static unambiguous property', in that it picks 
out at most a single individual, across time and change." sure makes 
it sound that way.

FoafNaut asks that you look someone up by there mbox, which indicates 
to me that it's being used as a key to distinguish elements of this 
distributed database, what we call FOAFfiles.

If that's the case, it seams like a bad key to me. An email address 
is no more definitely attributable to a single person than a phone 
number; that is, a whole family might share an email address and 
thereby make it difficult to register multiple family members with 
FOAFNaut or other systems using that as their key.

Am I defining this property incorrectly?

/Joe
-- 
Joe Tennis
Information Design Honcho
Joe 10 Group
2430 5th Street
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joe at joe10.com
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