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Re: patterns vs. identifiers

• To: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
• Subject: Re: patterns vs. identifiers
• From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>
• Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 21:40:52 -0600
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: Message from Arjun Ray <aray@n...> of "Mon, 26 Aug 2002 01:55:43 -0000." <441jmu49cf1h6cvbr4egq1clr87ipti8ac@4...>
• Sender: uche.ogbuji@f...

> Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...> wrote:
> | [Mike Haarman:]
> |> On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, Mike Champion wrote:
> |> 
> |>> I think this gets to the heart of Simon's point: He's asserting, and
> |>> I'm agreeing, that you DON'T need something like Cyc or a huge
> |>> RDF ontology to disambuguate / figure out how to process markup
> |>> via its context rather than an elaborate system of identifiers.
> |> 
> |> Yes, yes! man.
> | 
> | OK.  So maybe you can explain this more clearly, because it is clear as 
> | mud to me. 
> 
> When it comes to naming things, there seems to be two schools of thought,
> platonist naming by provenance and instrumental naming by purpose.  

Humph!  I see far more than these 2 "schools of thought".  For example, 
mnemonic naming doesn't strictly fall into either of these categories.

My wife and I have a child overdue now, so I am abnormally keen to matters of 
naming (we don't know the sex, nor do we have Igbo names picked out, though we 
have English ones).

As far as I'm concerned naming is one of the most fundamentally inexplicable 
things people do, and there is no way of lumping approaches to naming into 
such neat camps.


> For the first school, if anything that comes to hand can be endowed with a
> cosmically unique name, then the mere invocation of it tells us What It
> All Means, and How It Fits Into The Grand Scheme Of Things, among sundry
> magnificent benefits.  In short, context is incidental; where something
> came from is all that really matters.

This is true of names arrived at by any method, if people who use the names 
choose to give the name such an ontological (warning: philosophical, not 
compsci usage) load.

A name is what you make of it.  Some people have stronger beliefs of the role 
of a name in meaning than others, but this is a function of the user, not the 
coiner of the name.


> For the second school, context is the main thing.  You only need different
> names to differentiate things; how these names relate to the Grand Unified
> Theory Of Everything could be magnificently irrelevant.

Again, I don't see how this is unique to functional names.


> The common ground is disambiguation of different referents (remembering
> that all markup is referential in the ultimate analysis).  Now, *if* a
> cosmically uniquifying naming scheme were possible, then using it would be
> *sufficient* for disambiguation.  But it isn't *necessary*, never mind
> whether it's possible.  (This, btw, is the humdinger of a non sequitur in
> the "Motivation and Summary" section of the Namespaces Rec.) 
> 
> Universal names are a chimera, a maguffin.

Yes.  So what does this have to do with RDF?


> | 1)  RDF does not require identifiers for "disambiguation" or any human 
> | facility at all. 
> 
> Glad to hear it.
> 
> | Never has. 
> 
> The whole business of needing universal names or whatever by day before
> yesterday originated in the murky depths of what became the RDF activity.
> So RDF has moved on, has it?  Glad to hear that, too.  After all, even the
> clouds from Chernobyl eventually dissipated.

I never heard this from the RDF activity.  Do you have a citation?  I have 
heard it from some of the more, er, overenthusiastic boosters of RDF, just as 
I've heard silly things from some boosters of markup.


> | In fact, RDF's "requirement" of identifiers is *exactly* as strong as 
> | XSLT's.  IS XSLT also an example of "identifier evil"?
> 
> Its syntax might qualify.
> 
> | 2)  I am quite confused as to how RDF comes into the picture. 
> 
> Because That's How It All Started.

I lost the trail somewhere.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                                    Fourthought, Inc.
http://uche.ogbuji.net    http://4Suite.org    http://fourthought.com
Track chair, XML/Web Services One Boston: http://www.xmlconference.com/
Basic XML and RDF techniques for knowledge management, Part 7 - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think12.html
Keeping pace with James Clark - http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-jclark.html
Python and XML development using 4Suite, Part 3: 4RDF - http://www-105.ibm.com/developerworks/education.nsf/xml-onlinecourse-bytitle/8A1EA5A2CF4621C386256BBB006F4CEC

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