RE: Learning from other disciplines?

Michael,

That sounds similar what I've been arguing for quite a while:

 (a) Ambiguity is unavoidable. (Pat Hayes has articulated this point much better than me though.)

 (b) The ambiguity involved in failing to distinguish between an IR and a non-IR is not fundamentally different than other kinds of ambiguity.

 (c) Something that is adequately clear and unambiguous to one application may be ambiguous to another application, because different apps have different needs.  A URI such as http://markbaker.ca/ that denotes both a person and a web page may be perfectly fine for an application that has no need to distinguish between IRs and non-IRs, but it may cause confusion and havok to an application that relies on such a distinction.

 (d) Therefore, there is no need to view such IR-versus-non-IR ambiguity as a violation of web architecture, though it may be a violation of good practice.

These points are explained a but further in
http://dbooth.org/2007/splitting/#httpRange-14



David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
+1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
http://www.hp.com/go/software

Statements made herein represent the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of HP unless explicitly so stated.
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-awwsw-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-awwsw-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Michael Hausenblas
> Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 8:39 AM
> To: AWWSW TF
> Subject: Learning from other disciplines?
> 
> 
> All,
> 
> This is a crazy idea, but please give it a thought before 
> rejecting it ...
> 
> As far as I gather 'we' sort of fail to agree if we 
> should/can define IR and
> non-IR or even if we need to differentiate between documents 
> and abstract
> things at all. One could now try to understand the problem 
> from a totally
> different point of view by learning from quantum mechanics.
> 
> You are surely aware of the waveparticle duality [1]? So why 
> can't we try
> to apply the same idea here. We can say, for example, that for a given
> application/use case the distinction between IR and non-IR 
> makes no sense at
> all and hence is useless; all that counts at the end of the 
> day are some
> bytes and maybe some metadata that we can get over the wire. 
> In other cases
> one thing may be abstract or one thing may be a document. The 
> Web version of
> the 'waveparticle duality'-equivalent would then render sort of:
> 
> ===
> The 'document-thing duality' addresses the inadequacy of 
> classical concepts
> (from the operating system domain, software development, etc.) like
> "document" and "abstract thing" in fully describing the behaviour of
> Web-scale objects. 
> ===
> 
> Comments, anyone?
> 
> Cheers,
>       Michael
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave-particle_duality
> 
> PS: Jonathan, thanks a lot for your detailed comments re the 
> dependencies
> visualisation - I will address them in a separate mail (esp. 
> the n^2 table
> approach - I like it ;)
> 
> -- 
> Dr. Michael Hausenblas
> DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
> National University of Ireland, Lower Dangan,
> Galway, Ireland, Europe
> Tel. +353 91 495730
> http://sw-app.org/about.html
> http://webofdata.wordpress.com/
> 
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 24 February 2009 22:08:28 UTC