- From: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2002 22:06:58 +0200
- To: www-tag@w3.org, "Joshua Allen" <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- CC: Bill de hÓra <dehora@eircom.net>, "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>
On Friday, August 2, 2002, 8:46:15 PM, Joshua wrote: >> > Semantic Web has to be able to tolerate the fact that you can't know >> > what a resource is, and thus different parties may not have a shared >> > perception of this, just like the Web needed 404 to work. -Tim >> >> Some of us have been saying just this for a while now. You can't design >> ambiguity out of a system this size or simply wish it away with by >> waving axioms at people, however desirable they are. >> JA> I wonder why this is so hard for people to understand. JA> Ambiguity is inevitable. OK? Is everyone happy now that we agree on this? JA> But I am puzzled how this has ANY bearing on the following "axiom": JA> "If two people independently use the same URI as an identifier, JA> they should be able to have a reasonable degree of confidence that JA> they are identifying the same resource. Its an axiom, but a circular or tautologous one. The resource has no independent existence - it comes into existence only by a URI being created for it. So the axiom is of the form 0+0, ie it is true, but does not say very much. It says that what a URL points to is what it points to. JA> People should not be required to parse, dereference, or otherwise JA> acquire any *additional* disambiguating information to provide JA> this basic guarantee. Right (unless they want) to talk about resource variants or resource contents in a particular variant at a particular point in time -- Chris mailto:chris@w3.org
Received on Saturday, 3 August 2002 16:07:28 UTC