[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)
At 02:44 PM 9/28/98 -0400, John Cowan wrote: >W. Eliot Kimber wrote: > >> So I maintain my assertion that names, not just name spaces, are ownable >> things. > >The difficulty is that there are so many names that are public domain; >their meaning is settled by tacit agreement among the users, not by >registration. (This does not mean that the *referent* is necessarily >in the public domain.) What's your point? Much software is in the public domain, yet software is ownable. Just because names are ownable doesn't mean that all names are owned. >For example, the name "Spencertown, New York" is not registered anywhere. >Spencertown is a part of the Town of Austerlitz ("Towns" in New York >State and New England are roughly what is called "townships" elsewhere >in the U.S.: registered land units larger than a county). But it >is custom alone that says what is, and what is not, Spencertown. > >Nevertheless, it makes sense as a topic of conversation. "I am going >to Spencertown" is intelligible even though Spencertown is not >subject to precise definition. How shall we handle names of this sort? It's intelligible if you know one thing: 1. What the name space context is (towns and townships in New York) How do we handle that? By establishing a name space context and then providing services for resolving names in it: John: I'm going to "Spencertown" today. Eliot: Oh, what or where is "Spencertown"? John: It's a little town in New York. Eliot: Never heard of it. Can you show me where it is on a map? John: Sure. {Gets out map, shows which Spencertown he means} Eliot: {Having received resource referenced by John's use of the name "Spencertown"}. Cool, have fun. This is no different from any other name resolution we do today. There are no unique problems here. There are no unique solutions. Cheers, E. -- <Address HyTime=bibloc> W. Eliot Kimber, Senior Consulting SGML Engineer ISOGEN International Corp. 2200 N. Lamar St., Suite 230, Dallas, TX 75202. 214.953.0004 www.isogen.com </Address> 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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