[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: more politics

• To: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Subject: Re: more politics
• From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>
• Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 07:37:57 -0400
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <3F1F73E1.7040902@t...>
• References: <r02000000-1026-BC099F40BD6811D7A0870003937A08C2@[192.168.124.11]> <oprssgstsbezizxn@s...> <3F1F6666.1060706@t...> <20030724052311.GC1890@m...> <3F1F73E1.7040902@t...>
• User-agent: Mutt/1.3.28i

Tim Bray scripsit:

> There is broad consensus that it's a bad thing for there to be ambiguity 
> about what a URI identifies.  It not only causes logical conundra, but 
> intellectual-property problems, indexing breakage, and is generally bad. 

I should <jedr> well hope so.  It should be about as broad as the consensus
that it would be a Bad Thing if we were all named "George Moskowitz".

>  I just have trouble believing that the ambiguity problem is going to 
> be helped by asserting that [...]
> URIs identify this but can't identify that, for nearly any 
> values of "this" and "that".  The only way to deal with the ambiguity 
> problem is by fighting entropy the way we normally do, with the 
> application of discipline and intelligence and organization.  Not by 
> fiat.

I agree absolutely.

> I had held the hope that one of the things the Semantic Web would be 
> good for would be to enable me to make useful machine-readable 
> statements along the lines of "this resource is just a JPEG of my cute 
> cat" and "this resource serves as a placeholder for the W3C in my KR 
> system".  But Pat Hayes et al tell me I'm all wrong.  Oh well.

Well, it certainly can, if you allow yourself to get above the raw RDF
assertion level.  In particular, using RDF Schema you can assert that
a resource belongs to the JPEGDocument class or the Painting class or
the FemaleHuman class.  And even though these names don't mean anything,
the pattern of RDF triples around each of them will be quite different.

-- 
Dream projects long deferred            John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
usually bite the wax tadpole.            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --James Lileks                  http://www.reutershealth.com

• References:
  • more politics
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
  • Re: more politics
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
  • Re: more politics
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
  • Re: more politics
    • From: John Cowan <cowan@m...>
  • Re: more politics
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

• Prev by Date: Re: An approach to describing the relationships betweenunits-of-measure
• Next by Date: Re: Re: more politics
• Previous by thread: Re: more politics
• Next by thread: Re: more politics
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread