Cart
|
[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: URIs and Names on the Web
 apologies to Joshua Allen / Jonathan Borden for my late nite posting/rant, since I criticized ( waited a few cycles as pointed out by Simon St. Laurent ), I should also comment ( putting on flame retardent flight suit... ), but I can't help feeling that this is how other victims were trapped....... I did indeed go through the vast number of emails when trying to assimilate this topic, so I am certain I have missed main tenets of the arguement, here is a gelogical analogy as inspired by Didier Martin's aliens. a new rock speciman, found in the field, could possibly be named; - using a latin name - using the name of the person who found it - using the name of the place where it was found - using the name reflecting characteristics of crystalline habit, chemical compisition, hardness test, color etc... - a mixture of the above To be sure, different geologists from different parts of the world will have different names, possibly reflecting their own, possibly simultaneous, discovery of the rock or perhaps they will simply have a different name due to their language. Presumably their could also be a different naming schema because this new rock 'fits in' with some previous findings or ontological framework. Not to mention that there will be groups of geologists considering one name more 'truer' then another. Names also can change through time....language mutation, context, etc.... To make things even more difficult, here are some other 'real life' naming and classification scenarios; - 2 rocks of exactly the same composition may be named because of the process that created them were different ( metamorphic .... ) - an artificialy created stone may be given a different name, even though it matches the exact chemical composition of another rock, there is also a 'brand name' of certain rocks. - I have even heard of a rock that was named after the nearest 'sound' where it was first found; which was that of a waterfall, so it was simply named 'waterfall' though this was in the local tribal dialect ( which was spoken by less then a few thousand people ! ) so we could state that; - a name does not automatically imply 'meaning' about itself, but it might ( e.g. someone named John Carpenter, may have had a carpenter as an ancestor ) - a name is not automatically an address or locator, or a universal token of identity, but it could be, especially as defined in the terms of scope and context - the actual binding of a semantic 'handle' to an inanimate object, occurs quite easily ......( imagine me pointing to a hat made of cheese....and I utter 'cheesehat', we can now have discussions about cheesehats ) as illustrated in the above naming situations. - a name does not neccesarily need to conform to some ontological naming system, other then possibly the rules of the underlying language I am definately out of my depth, with respect to any kind of 'logic' formalisms....but it does strike me that creating ontologies is partially an effort to encode within a name some sort of further meaning about itself. An ontological system also possibly defines a sense of place or 'where' any element plots respective of other elements in a classification system. This is useful if you are a student trying to remember 3000 different kinds of e.g. rocks....but what is the analogy with machine manipulated ontologies ? Do they need hints other then those which assist in processing? Of course we humans still need em. A problem I see is the mixing of the transport layer with the semantic layer ? I don't see why we need to bind or create any formalisms to specifically HTTP, other then where performance demands it. Though admittedly we need to use existing HTTP methods to achieve what we want, so ( as proven by Thomas Passin very recent RFC analysis this looks sensible, possibly even foreshadowed ) I don't see why we can't have named resources via HTTP, though we could admit that the use of them in an HTTP derived semantic web would have to be explicitly defined, and thusly the questions and statements we could pose to such systems ( and their related responses) would have dependancy upon these definitions. As illustrated by the above blah blah on geology, an admittedly small scant sampling of human knowledge,that its almost a 100% certainty that a resource will probably have many different name(s), identity and locations throughout its semantic lifetime ( hehehehe, just put semantic infront of it; and presto new word ). A world which constrains a named resource to one universal convention, isnt a world I want to live in. Though my example focused on the 'name' aspect, I think that there has been enough about identity and locations previously. I think having a trully 'universal' naming convention is something not achievable and possibly counterintuitive to what is desired. If I was a perfectionist I would have a real issue with the idea of using HTTP naming scheme to address non-network-retrievable resources, but since I'm not I can dismiss it is not as not being terribly relevent ( yet ). to possibly sum it up; 'Whoever or whatever that is involved in creating statements or having a semantic conversation over HTTP using URL's as a named resource(s), should consistently check and agree on the convention being currently employed for the conversation(s) about the use of named resource ( and maybe even related scoping rules for identity and location ), so instead of an implicit builtin HTTP bounded relationship that a URL IS the 'name'of a resource. We could have a little bit of negotiation that works out the contract that states the ground rules ( with of course a default contract that reflects the most common situation of URL as a name to a resource )' in real life, what does this mean, I could imagine a well formed xml document gets exchanged | referred | annotated | updated between peers, clients or servers, in the process of creating a statement | question | answer on the HTTP enabled semantic web. The result is that a statement | question | answer would refer to this contract and thusly have a dependency. The vocabulary of the xml document would presumably have to explicitly annotate conventions and scope to be used in the statement | question | answer. This should definately exclude any notion of mapping. and who cares about the performance implications.....seems to fix itself every few years any how ! cheers, jim fuller 
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! 
Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|
|||||||||
