Separated at birth

It's been a while since I've posted, but then again, I did promise that posting would be irregular... Anyway, the topic for today is identity:







So what do you think, is this just coincidence? The implications of it being one and the same person are "interesting". Maybe there's truth to the idea that Microsoft is "evil"? Even worse, is there perhaps an "evil" penguin trying to penetrate the Linux world?

For the most part humans aren't going to have trouble deciding these are really two different people. However, computers don't have it so easy. Part of the solution may lie in ontologies. Ontologies tell us how everything is related to each other. Once you know something is related to something you have a clue if two things are the same thing: are they related to the same things? If not, they can't be the same thing. If they are related to the same things, well we still may not know for sure. Conversely, we can't build ontologies if we don't agree on identities. Ontologies are work, people have to build them and agree to them. Identifying things for ontologies seems even harder.

Don't look for WWW URIs for help on this issue. In particular, don't ever assume that you really even know what lies at the end of a URI. It's a resource, but there really isn't a concrete definition of a "resource". That's mostly by design, the WWW doesn't think URIs in themselves hand out guarantees. I can by into this, but if we can't know that two resources are the same then building ontologies becomes even more complex.

So is there a solution on the horizon? Not that I can see (pun intended...)