Re: New question: distinguished status of http:?

On 2002-02-27 17:11, "ext Tim Berners-Lee" <timbl@w3.org> wrote:

> ...  That said, the cost of bringing
> in
> a new URI scheme is one of the greatest possible costs in the whole design.
> URIs are something every agent is expected to be able to understand,
> the loss when it doesn't being that the web fragments into inaccessible
> areas.

Hmmmm... this seems to suggest to me that there would be utility in a
standardized means by which applications could obtain knowledge about what
URI schemes mean, in some standardized manner and according to some
standardized ontologies, to determine what is expected of them.

Would not the Semantic Web offer a means of extensibility for
URI scheme semantics so that agents need not know, as part of their
static design, about all possible URI schemes?

We provide auxiliary, supporting knowledge for XML instances that
say how to validate them, display them, transform them, etc. so that
applications need not understand natively what the significance
of particular markup vocabularies are. Why then would it be
unreasonable to provide auxiliary knowledge about URI schemes so that
applications could be similarly informed about what a given URI means,
even if it has never seen one of that scheme before?

Patrick

--
               
Patrick Stickler              Phone: +358 50 483 9453
Senior Research Scientist     Fax:   +358 7180 35409
Nokia Research Center         Email: patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2002 13:04:27 UTC