Re: URIs for terms: motivation [was: Requirements Document]

>
>This really needs to be discussed in more detail and deconstructed. 
>Its full of nonsequiteurs and misunderstandings. The fact is that 
>the entire concept of URI is completely confused right now, and 
>nothing in any documentation put out by the W3C is enough to clarify 
>it. We can't just take it as a given, we have to have some 
>discussion of what it is supposed to mean. In particular, what is 
>"on the Web" ?? If a document has a URL and uses a referring 
>expression, is that expression on the web? Is the thing named by the 
>expression on the web? What does 'identified distinctly' mean, 
>exactly? None of this is clear, and getting it clear is one of the 
>most important jobs we could do.


Pat - thanks for the many very valuable contributions you made today 
(glad you found the missing mail :->)   On this one, however, I want 
to make a "Chair's statement" which is that while I personally agree 
with the fact that getting this right is crucial, and hope fervently 
that the W3C Technical Architecture Group is working the issue, I 
think we can RULE THIS OUT OF SCOPE for our working group - we can 
certainly state what version or document, or what assumptions about 
URIs we are making, but trying to solve this is well-beyond our 
charter and I want to make sure we don't spend too much time going in 
this direction...
  -JH




-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
AV Williams Building, Univ of Maryland		  College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler