Re: Distributed querying on the semantic web

On Apr 19, 2004, at 23:19, ext Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:

>
>
> From: "Phil Dawes" <pdawes@users.sourceforge.net>
> Subject: Distributed querying on the semantic web
> Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 12:48:02 +0100
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I like Patrick Stickler's assertion that in order to participate in
>> the 'semantic web', http URIs should be dereferencable to some
>> information about the URI.
>
> I believe that you meant information about the referent (denotation, 
> meaning,
> ...) of the URI.  If all that is available is information about the 
> URI,
> then this is not very interesting, as I really don't need to know much
> about a URI.
>
> However, I do hope that you did not mean necessary information about 
> the
> referent (denotation, meaning, ...) of the URI.  I vigorously oppose 
> any
> attempt to require that part of the meaning of a URI that my 
> applications
> are supposed to abide by be the meaning that can be found in a document
> found by dereferencing the URI.  To pick my favourite example, I do not
> want my applications to be required to abide by the information 
> available
> at http://www.whitehouse.gov just because I use the URI
> http://www.whitehouse.gov/#GeorgeWBush, *even* if this information is 
> only
> something like
> 	http://www.whitehouse.gov/#GeorgeWBush rdf:type foaf:person .

To clarify my own position, I feel it is of substantial benefit if URIs
used to denote resources are meaningful to HTTP processes, but not 
necessarily
that GET should be the primary means to obtain descriptions of resources
(i.e. MGET [1] is much better suited for this purpose).

Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between authoritative 
knowledge
obtained from the web authority of a given URI versus third party 
knowledge
obtained from other sources.

Also, I do not presume that any agent is bound to conform to any 
constraints
on the basis of any data/information recieved by any server.

Every bit if information recieved by an agent from any source is 
suspect,
and what information the agent chooses to trust and utilize in any 
particular
context for any given task is a different issue entirely. Simply 
recieving
some information form some web authority in no way constitutes a binding
agreement between the web authority and the agent constraining the 
behavior
of the agent.

Cheers,

Patrick


--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Thursday, 22 April 2004 03:33:53 UTC