RE: Summary of the QName to URI Mapping Problem

> >See my posting from today on the www-rdf-interest group:
> >http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-interest/2001Aug/
> 0134.html
> >for an alternative approach to my other proposal.
> 
> OK< thanks, I did. But I fail to follow your point. You object to the 
> use of the character '#' to divide URIs into parts, but you seem to 
> be suggesting as a solution to the problem, to use the character ':' 
> instead. If your proposal amounts to more than this, or if I have 
> mis-stated it, I'd be grateful for an explanation. Why don't the very 
> same objections that you raise to the RDF proposal apply, with minor 
> variations, to your proposal?

You apparently did not understand what I was trying to say (which is
probably due to my poor communication skills). My proposal does not
say "use delimiter ':' between arbitrary namespace+name pairs to derive
the URI". I agree, that's hardly different than using '#' or any other
character.

The proposal (which actually was not a serious proposal, but, and I
again stress here since it seems to have been completely missed by
everyone who presumably read the posting, was only meant as food
for discussion, providing an alternate perspective on the mapping
issue) was to use an explicit URI scheme, not any arbitrary namespace
inherited URI scheme, in the derivation of URIs from QNames.

If this was not clear, feel free to re-re-read my posting(s).

Or rather, don't bother. It doesn't seem to be a fruitful use of
anyone's time. 
 
> Well, apart from the politics, why not? Suppose someone were to 
> complain about having to write legal Java code, on the grounds that 
> Java interpreters ought to be smart enough to see what he means, 
> without him having to go and read all those boring manuals? That 
> seems to me to be an exactly similar attitude to yours. 

I am sorry, but clearly you have totally missed the substance of my 
message, and have diverged into areas that have no relation to what 
I have previously said or intended to say. I guess the semantics
wasn't preserved between my brain and my fingers at the keyboard...

> >And even if I conceded that RDF has a right to demand that such
> >"special" URIs be used for namespaces (which I don't), RDF doesn't
> >actually *require* nor specify that such special URIs must be
> >used, and therefore folks aren't going to use them, and we will
> >potentially face collisions and unneccesary ambiguity in the SW.
> 
> Ah, well now that is a reasonable point. The RDF spec should be clear 
> on the matter. But that isnt what you have been saying until now.

With all due respect, that is precisely what motivated these series
of discussions, and has been a common theme throughout them. My
apologies if that has not been sufficiently clear in my choice of
words. No, that is not the core of the specific posting referenced
above, but that posting was a sub-branch of a much longer discussion
regarding the relationship between QNames in serialized RDF and
URIs in RDF graphs. Sorry if you missed the contextualizing posts.

Regards,

Patrick

--
Patrick Stickler                      Phone:  +358 3 356 0209
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Received on Wednesday, 29 August 2001 01:59:40 UTC