Re: resources and URIs

Yes, I think that we are very close in making the bridge between the 
linguistics an the engineering.

Two agents, when they communicate, can never know what interpretation 
the other has.   However, whenever in the communication there arises 
something which indicates that the same URI denotes different things 
for the two, then they can sit down and work it out until they have 
resolved it, and they now have no more inconsistencies.

So at any such consistent point, an agent is working with a given [set 
of] interpretation[s], and with a set of other agents, in this state of 
consistency.
We have said that one agent can never know what interpretation another 
agent has. However, we also know that there is nothing they have come 
across which is inconsistent with the belief that the other agents 
share his interpretation. So the agent may continue as though the other 
agents do in fact have exactly the same interpretation. This assumption 
of single interpretation works because it is not measurably wrong.

Every time one performs some experiment to determine in another way 
whether the agents have the same interpretation, then either one
(This of course has string parallels in the human linguistics,  the 
more fuzzy way in which people hone their common understandings)

Dan's "man/most useful" could be the set of interpretations which have 
no discernible discrepancies.  In your Fido example, the playing with 
Fido is one of the experiments.

Tim


On Friday, Jul 18, 2003, at 07:56 US/Eastern, Graham Klyne wrote:

> Noting your ongoing debate, I wondered if something that Dan said [1] 
> might be a bridge to useful progress...
>
> At 17:51 16/07/03 -0500, Dan Connolly wrote:
>> Well, it's pretty close... try taking 'identify' to mean
>> "denote in many/most useful interpretations".
>
> and ...
>
> At 23:34 17/07/03 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>> Example1.
>>
>> A dog bounds into the room. Tim says, "Here, Fido!" to the dog, and 
>> says "Pat, meet my dog, Fido" to Pat. Tim plays with th edog. Tim 
>> asks Pat, "Pat, would please take Fido for a walk?"
>> Pat takes the dog for a walk.  The name seems to have been 
>> unambiguously associated with te same dog in both there minds.
>
> I think the point here is that the name here is associated with 
> something in each mind similar enough that doing the action of "taking 
> it for a walk" has the same observable outcome.
>
> Fido might be interpreted to denote the dog, or to denote a collection 
> of fleas that live on the dog, but to take "Fido" for a walk amounts 
> to the same thing.
>
> #g
> --
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Jul/0159.html
>
>
> -------------------
> Graham Klyne
> <GK@NineByNine.org>
> PGP: 0FAA 69FF C083 000B A2E9  A131 01B9 1C7A DBCA CB5E

Received on Saturday, 19 July 2003 22:38:20 UTC