- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2011 22:05:14 -0700
- To: Xiaoshu Wang <xiao@renci.org>, Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- CC: Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>, David Booth <david@dbooth.org>, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com>, "www-tag@w3.org List" <www-tag@w3.org>
Using a URI to identify a resource has ambiguity in many dimensions, not just use/mention.
>Suppose the following holds:
>
> <http://example/z> xhv:license <http://example/l1>.
>
>Suppose that I do a GET of 'http://example/z' and retrieve a
>"representation" R.
Is the license for z just for R, or does it apply to, say, any transcluded content?
Does it apply to the R that is returned NOW, or does it apply for all time?
Does the license apply to the whole site, or just the "home page"?
>My interlocutor wants me to be able to infer that
>
> R xhv:license <http://example/l1>.
I don't know how xhv:license can relate things that aren't given
by URIs. But let's imagine that R is a sequence of bytes RB with media type RT,
where RBE is the base64 encoding of RB.
data:RT;base64,RBE
is the 'same' representation R.
Does <data:RT;base64,RBE> xhv:license <http://example/l1> hold?
I think that's only one of the interpretations of the original assertion.
I'm thinking that rather than trying to disambiguate these possible interpretations dynamically (by restricting the URIs to HTTP URIs and attempting disambiguation by whether the HTTP server returns one status code or another), that the disambiguation should be made explicitly
<the-content-visible-when-rendering-the-results-of-accessing-at-any-time http://example/z> xhv:license <http://example/l1>
If I want to explicitly disambiguate that I mean
- at any time
- including transcluded images
- not including any other content
Likely this is an approach that has been tried before, but if so, kindly point out why it was rejected.
The use/mention ambiguity is useful. If I invent a cartoon character and want to license the _character_ (and not just the drawing of the character), I might usefully want to apply a license to the "thing described by" a drawing, or leave it ambiguous exactly how close some other drawing has to be before it is the "same" character.
Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Friday, 24 June 2011 05:05:50 UTC