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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Ownership of Names (was Re: Public identifiers and topic maps)
 W. Eliot Kimber scripsit: > >"-//John Cowan//TOPIC Spencertown, N.Y." [...] suggests > >that *my* Spencertown is meant, and I do not mean *my* Spencertown, > >but *the* Spencertown, the one that appears on the maps. > > No no no. If by "-//John Cowan//TOPIC Spencertown, N.Y." you mean a small > town in the state of New York (United States of America) commonly known as > "Spencertown", then that is fine . There is nothing in > that FPI that suggests that you are claiming ownership of Spencertown, any > more than the Library of Congress issuing a catalog numbers suggests > ownership of the books cataloged. I was too elliptical. By "*my* Spencertown" I meant, not the Spencertown I own, but rather the thing that I (idiosyncratically) call "Spencertown". In other words, "-//John Cowan/DOCUMENT RDF Made Easy//EN" refers to the thing that *I* call "RDF Made Easy", but when I use the name "Spencertown" I do not merely mean "whatever *I* call 'Spencertown'" but rather the town that is *commonly*, *customarily*, so called. > (except that a town is not a topic, so the > public text class is incorrect--it should be NONSGML) Ah, then I don't know what a TOPIC is. By "topic" I mean "subject of discussion", as in "our current topic is the proper use of FPIs." If we were talking of Spencertown --- for example, if I told you that the country store there was owned by Tom Reamer --- then Spencertown would be our current topic. In the non-hypothetical world, "Spencertown" is one of our topics (i.e. the name of the town), but Spencertown is not. > Now, if by "-//John Cowan//TOPIC Spencertown, N.Y." you mean "the idea of > place called 'Spencertown' as expressed by John Cowan", then the FPI refers > to the topic that you happen to own (by having expressed your ideas about > this town (and the public text class is correct). This looks like a use/mention distinction, but I do not grasp its applicability here. Also, I do not know what an "idea" is in formal language. > If what is wanted is a way to refer to places by FPI in a way that is > authoritative, then I suggest asking the U.S. Geological Survey or the CIA > or some UN agency to register a public owner identifier and define an > algorithm for getting from their published (on paper) identifiers for > places to syntactically valid FPIs (or URNs of any sort). But that's the trouble. Spencertown, I repeat, has no official existence: it is not defined by any registry, but by common acceptation. > For example, I might expect something like this: > > +//IDN us.gov::Geological Survey::places//NONSGML > municipality::Spencertown::New York::USA//EN Spencertown is not a "municipality": it is neither a Town, a Village, a City, or an Indian Reservation, which classes exhaustively specify New York State local entities. It is simply a region, part of the (official) Town of Austerlitz, that people have agreed to desginate by that name. > But lacking a cataloging agency and either assigned names or a > deterministic algorithm for generating names from some other classification > scheme, there's not much you can do. That does not mean that there *should* not be anything you can do. In such contexts as this, we need a way to reify the concept of a "public domain name". -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@c... You tollerday donsk? N. You tolkatiff scowegian? Nn. You spigotty anglease? Nnn. You phonio saxo? Nnnn. Clear all so! 'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5) xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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