RE: Outside our charter, was: Schema LCC review

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ext Jan Grant [mailto:Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk]
> Sent: 15 January, 2003 13:35
> To: Brian McBride
> Cc: RDFCore Working Group
> Subject: Outside our charter, was: Schema LCC review
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Brian McBride wrote:
> 
> > At 12:03 14/01/2003 +0000, Jan Grant wrote:
> 
> > >5.4.1 rdfs:seeAlso
> > >
> > >You carefully don't say much here, which is good. However, 
> I think this
> > >raises an issue which we should address (even if it's to 
> punt) before or
> > >as part of LC:
> > >
> > >         If a resource is named by something that looks like a URI,
> > >         then what expectations can we have about that? If 
> we (through
> > >         some process) dereference that URI, what can we expect to
> > >         see? Ie, is there any expectation (and if so, when) that
> > >         the use of a web address to name something means that we
> > >         can get a description of the named thing by 
> dereferencing that
> > >         address? Or does the web address name the description
> > >         itself?
> >
> > We are going nowhere near that.  Way outside our charter.
> 
> Look at the second sentence of the primer abstract. "[RDF] is
> particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources,
> such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page,
> copyright and licensing information about a Web document, or the
> availability schedule for some shared resource."
> 
> BUT throughout all our LCC documents, we repeatedly say that, 
> as far as
> RDF is concerned, there is nothing apart from an accidental 
> relationship
> between a URIref used to denote a resource in RDF and what the web
> considers to be named (or addressed) by that URIref. That is, that RDF
> is agnostic about any such relationship.
> 
> Yet many of our examples and text gives the lie to this. It's 
> clear also
> that WG members seem to think that there's more going on. Paraphrasing
> DanC from a recent telecon: "that [URIref used to name a test case]
> 404's, that's no good, that must be fixed." Yet _nothing_ in the RDF
> documents we've produced supports DanC's position on this. In fact,
> Appendix A of the primer explicitly shoots it down.
> 
> OK, you might rule this outside our charter. But if RDF forms 
> the bottom
> layer of the semantic _web_, where does the responsibility 
> for answering
> this lie? At some higher level?
> 
> It seems that in RDF in the wild, sometimes a URIref-labelled resource
> is used to denote a thing that you can get a description about using
> that name as a web address. Sometimes it denotes the 
> description itself.
> And sometimes it denotes something else entirely. But there's no
> mechanism or machinery to support this, and the issue is rarely even
> mentioned.
> 
> If it's not RDFCore's job, then it's certainly a TAG job, and I would
> hope that this issue can be raised as a matter of priority. There's a
> tech plenary coming up soon - maybe there?
> 
> Please consider this a last call comment (in advance). We currently
> don't stay silent on this, we instead say "it's not our job". That
> answer doesn't suffice - it needs to identify _whose_ job it is to
> provide an answer on this.


I don't think we need to say anything more than we have
said, especially since this involves an open debate and
nothing more can be said reliably.

I consider it the TAG's job to resolve/clarify this issue.

Patrick

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2003 07:01:27 UTC