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Re: patterns vs. identifiers

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: patterns vs. identifiers
• From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
• Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2002 01:55:43 +0000
• In-reply-to: <E17j8Tg-0001hZ-00@m...>
• References: <mhaarma@s...> of "Mon, 19 Aug 2002 21:55:58 CDT." <Pine.GSO.4.30.0208192125240.14034-100000@t...> <E17j8Tg-0001hZ-00@m...>

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.  

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.

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.

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.

| 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.

| 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.

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: patterns vs. identifiers
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
  • Re: patterns vs. identifiers
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>

• References:
  • Re: patterns vs. identifiers
    • From: Mike Haarman <mhaarma@s...>
  • Re: patterns vs. identifiers
    • From: Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>

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