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

Hi Dan,

: Dan Brickley:
:
: But the Web still works...

...because people are the glue that currently hold it together? 

At some point, to get this stuff to work without the intercession 
of people (or at least with minimal intercession), we're going to 
have to architect systems of reference and naming into our code. 
We're going to have to pick one. Or work out how to bind together 
more than one, since realistically there's no way we'll get people 
to agree to code one and one only. 

Now if we can't agree here on how many URIs can dance on the head 
of a pin, or even what the name of the pin is, how do we tell our 
machines how to agree? The point being that social fictions are not 
precise enough for today's computers, if we're serious about getting 
them to interoperate at anything like sentence levels of discourse. 

So I'm inclined to disagree: I think there are merits in this 
argument, although grounding it in code wouldn't hurt any. 

regards,
Bill de hÓra

Received on Wednesday, 18 April 2001 03:21:08 UTC