Why URIs for Words/Terms?
String literals cannot serve as subjects of an RDF triple, so it is not conveniently possible to express knowledge about words using string literals. To express lexical knowledge, several ontologies have instead defined OWL classes that represent words or other terms in a language. However, the URIs for individual terms were often created on an ad hoc basis. For instance, the W3C draft RDF/OWL Representation of WordNet defined URIs for the words covered by the WordNet lexical database. Linking to term URIs is especially useful to establish the meaning of a non-information resource URI more clearly. For, example, we might have an URI such as
