[metadataInURI-31] New draft of "Use of Metadata in URIs" for consideration at F2F

I have prepared a new draft of the metadata in URI finding [1,2] for 
review at the TAG F2F next week.  This draft attempts to deal with many 
but not quite all of the significant comments received on the previous 
draft [3].   The reason for publishing now is so that we have something 
new to consider for next week, and in particular so that we can see 
whether I have adequately addressed several of the high priority issues 
that did come up.

The issues that I have attempted to address in this draft include:

Making clearer that the admonition against >software< dependencies on 
unlicensed conclusions about metadata is very strong (MUST NOT), and 
explaining why the rules for human users of the Web are somewhat 
different.  There are number of changes made to support this, including:
The MUST NOT constraint now only refers to software
Text added to the discussion says: 
"Note that the constraint refers to conclusions drawn by software, which 
must be trustworthy, as opposed to guesses made by people. As discussed in 
"2.3 Guessing information from a URI", guessing is something that people 
using the Web do quite often and for good reason. Software tends to be 
long lived and widely distributed. Thus unlicensed metadata dependencies 
in software result not only in buggy systems, but in inappropriate 
expectations that authorities will constrain their URI assignment policies 
and representation types to match the dependencies in the clients. For 
both of these reasons, the constraint above requires that software must 
not have such unlicensed dependencies."

There was a request to tighten the wording of the constraint in 2.1.  I 
have done that.

Section 2.4: I have included text from Frank Mannola (slightly edited) 
explaining a bit better why conclusions can be drawn in the 
"your-city-name-here" example.  (Thank you, Frank!)

Section 2.4: Explained that HTML forms sourced from the same authoritity 
as the URIs generated by the form carry more normative weight (as 
documentation) than forms sourced from 3rd parties.  This was noted by 
several commentators.

The section that says "don't do it even when the specs say you could" is 
now the second section (2.2) rather than the last, further emphasizing the 
"software shouldn't peek" message.

Took out the word "thus" in the Intro, as requested by Raman.

TimBL and Raman: I'm particularly curious whether you are now comfortable 
with the distinction made between software and people, as that was 
important to both of you, and I think I've significantly strengthened that 
message in this draft.

This is not intended as a final draft.  If an issue already raised is not 
covered, that may mean I propose not to address it, it may mean that I 
hope to but haven't gotten to it, or that I haven't decided.  I'll be 
traveling a lot after the TAG meeting, but I will eventually distribute to 
www-tag yet another draft covering additional issues, as well as an 
explicit indication of issues that I propose not to address at all.  I do 
have comprehensive logs of everything I've seen mentioned since the last 
draft;  you don't need to restate comments already made, at least until 
you see whether they are addressed later.

Thanks!

Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20060609.html
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/metaDataInURI-31-20060511.html

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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