RE: Proposed issue: What does using an URI require of me and my s oftware?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bijan Parsia [mailto:bparsia@isr.umd.edu]
> Sent: Friday, October 03, 2003 10:09 AM
> To: Tim Berners-Lee
> Cc: public-sw-meaning@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Proposed issue: What does using an URI require 
> of me and my
> software?
> 
> 
> 
> Sorry for the delay in replying.
> 
> On Friday, September 26, 2003, at 10:42  AM, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> 
> >
> > In-Reply-to Bijan's original   
> > <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-sw-meaning/2003Sep/ 
> > 0054.html> , clarifications.
> >
> > - Use of an HTTP URI as a symbol in an RDF statement
> >  refers to one thing which the URI owner intended.
> 
> So, this is broken out of the gate, right? I mean, why 
> "intended"? Did  
> you mean, "What the current URI owner current intends"? And what if  
> they intended it to refer to more than one thing? Why is the 
> one thing  
> important, anyway. (I tend to strongly agree with Pat on 
> this. And to  
> go further that I'd rather that the use of a URI mean what *I*, the  
> document author, intended it to mean.)
> 
> > - The URI owner puts true, consistent, hum &/or machine
> > readable information in the
> >   document that you get should you chose to dereference the URI.
> 
> And this seems compatible with "And I assert other things about the  
> 'one thing' that may or may not be consistent with what the 
> URI owner,  
> fool that they may be, sez about it. And I'm taking my 'may' rights  
> very seriously and not going to chose to dereference that URI."
> 

I'm curious about exactly what each of you, or anyone else, envisions as the
problem scenarios here. Is it 

1. An owner, A,  defines a URI to have a meaning which some other author, B,
redefines or misinterprets to have a different meaning in his document, and
then a consumer, C, reading B's document mistakenly assumes that A's meaning
is intended.

2. An owner, A, defines a URI to have some meaning, and then B takes some
liberty with the use of the URI; maybe something along the lines of the use
of the word 'infinite' in the phrase 'infinite wisdom'. A mathemetician
might argue that this is an improper use of the word, but most of us don't
see it as a problem.

The reason I digress to these somewhat simple examples is that it seems to
me that once the tools evolve, these judgement calls will be made not by
computer scientists, but by businessmen, supervisors, etc. I suppose we
could build some kind of semantic consistency checker into the tools; MS
Word RDF/OWL Check?

Naively curious,
James

Received on Friday, 3 October 2003 11:24:16 UTC