XML Editor - Download a Free Trial >
See What's New >
Buy Now >

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

Re: Lessons learned from the XML experiment

  • From: Kurt Cagle <kurt.cagle@gmail.com>
  • To: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com>
  • Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 20:37:27 -0800
Re: Lessons learned from the XML experiment
Play the video

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 6:19 AM, Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
t's easy: I've learned over the years that people who believe in certainty, especially those who believe that they can communicate certainty, are dangerous. 
Something goes deeply wrong when people assume that it is possible to know things precisely, to name things precisely, and to communicate things precisely.  (I'll grant that claims of precision are slightly less dangerous than claims of accuracy.)

I sometimes call it naive positivism, but there are other philosophical schools that lead to the same sad place.  Computers, of course, encourage such delusions, but that is largely because they know so little about the world.

This is a philosophy to live by. RDF works when you keep to the open world assumption, works even better when you treat all assertions as provisional until proven otherwise. I've been modeling "assumption" frameworks, rather than assertion ones, precisely (pardon the pun) to provide a way of expressing risk, uncertainty and ambiguity. 
 
Uche is extra-right about URIs, of course, a corner that painfully demonstrates these limitations again and again.

I've long felt that namespaces would have been a great deal less problematic if, early on, a formal protocol distinct from http: had been assigned. If you had a namespace uri of the form

ns:com.example.foo.bar

people wouldn't have tried to conflate them with http URLs, wouldn't have tried to treat them like web directory paths, and would probably have made them more readily adopted by developers who were already seeing other languages using similar notations for their namespace conventions. Surprisingly, I think that namespaces (and prefixes) work better in RDF, at least in Turtle or Sparql, 


Kurt Cagle
Invited Expert, XForms Working Group, W3C
Managing Editor, XMLToday.org

[Date Prev] | [Thread Prev] | [Thread Next] | [Date Next] -- [Date Index] | [Thread Index]

PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!

Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced!

Buy Stylus Studio Now

Download The World's Best XML IDE!

Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today!

Don't miss another message! Subscribe to this list today.
Email
First Name
Last Name
Company
Subscribe in XML format
RSS 2.0
Atom 0.3
 

Stylus Studio has published XML-DEV in RSS and ATOM formats, enabling users to easily subcribe to the list from their preferred news reader application.


Stylus Studio Sponsored Links are added links designed to provide related and additional information to the visitors of this website. they were not included by the author in the initial post. To view the content without the Sponsor Links please click here.

XML Editor - Download a 15 Day Free Trial Now >
See What's New in Stylus Studio >
Buy Stylus Studio - XML Editor - Now >
Site Map | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Trademarks
Free Stylus Studio XML Training:
W3C Member
Stylus Studio® and DataDirect XQuery ™are products from DataDirect Technologies, is a registered trademark of Progress Software Corporation, in the U.S. and other countries. © 2004-2013 All Rights Reserved.