Re: Terminology (was Re: article on URIs, is this material that can be used by the)

On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 15:20 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote:
[...]
> There I disagree. Your locution here reveals the essential point. 
> "the sort of relationship to the resource that we expect for 
> information resources". WRONG. In fact, I expect to have at least TWO 
> distinct relationships to information resources. I expect to be able 
> to access them, using some kind of xxxTP protocol, AND I expect to be 
> able to refer to them. Referring to them is exactly like referring to 
> anything else: the same relationship is involved, the same semantic 
> theories apply, and the same inference processes can be used for 
> referential languages. When referring, the nature of thing referred 
> to is almost irrelevant, in fact. The distinction between kinds of 
> resource matters only because non-information resources can't be 
> accessed. But if we distinguished between reference (naming) and 
> access (as we should have been doing since day one and as everyone 
> did before the W3C - in what is surely one of the most regrettable 
> mistakes since the founding of the Holy Roman Empire - confused URLs 
> and URNs into a single category) instead of calling them both 
> 'identify' and insisting that they are the same relation, then we 
> wouldn't need to be having this damn silly discussion.

webarch has always distinguished between access
and reference. Identification is reference, not access.

"By design a URI identifies one resource."

That's reference.

Then, elsewhere,

"Agents may use a URI to access the referenced resource; this is called
dereferencing the URI."
 -- http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/#dereference-uri

What suggests to you that they are muddled?

OK, perhaps it's a bit confusing that "reference" means identification
while "dereference" means access.

And why do you suggest that the same name can't be used
both ways? Surely "Pat Hayes" is used both ways:

  Pat Hayes is a hoopy frood.

vs

  Hey Pat Hayes, come over here!


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Tuesday, 26 June 2007 20:51:25 UTC