Re: A plea for peace. was: RE: DAML+OIL (March 2001) released: a correction

Aaron Swartz wrote:
> 
> David Allsopp <dallsopp@signal.dera.gov.uk> wrote:
> >> There is no authority to define the
> >> "meaning" of a word. However, it is clear who defines the meaning of a URI
> >> -- its "owner".
> >
> > I don't understand - who 'owns' an arbitrary URI?
> 
> The owner is defined by the URI scheme.
> 
> > for example, http://www.microsoft.com/ is clearly owned by MS, but who
> > owns http://ludicrously.long.domain.name.I.just.invented/, or
> 
> I don't believe it is owned yet, since it has not been registered with ICANN
> / root DNS. (I'm not positive, but pretty sure. It may also be considered as
> if that ICANN owns it, but I don't think so.)
> 
> > http://www.pixeltronic.com/ which may or may not be a real company (I
> 
> Similar to above.
> 
> > haven't checked!), or urn:A23B67B675BErandomlygeneratedgibberish or
> > similar?
> 
> That URN would probably be owned by the first person who used it, which is
> likely the only one because duplication is so unlikely.

So there are various cases where we either don't know who owns a URI, or
nobody owns it, or we can't find out without some checking.

We also can't necessarily find out what the owner meant by the URI
either, in general; we may be able to _if_ it's a term defined in a
schema and _if_ an authoritative version of that schema is available.

It may not be clear whether usage of a URI changes the owner's intent -
for example, if they assign an rdf:type to a URI, and I add another one
(multiple types) have I "changed the meaning"? Or if I say that it's a
subClassOf some type from another schema? And so on...

So in practical terms I don't think it always helps us much to say that
the meaning is defined by the owner.

Regards,

David Allsopp.

-- 
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Received on Thursday, 12 April 2001 04:10:16 UTC