Re: "shape" as a relationship, not a class

Arthur,

The 'cool URIs' note describes a viewpoint that is, let's say, controversial. And one that has not had much adoption.

Over the years, there have been many discussions on this topic. You will see some of these if you read through the thread responses in the post Richard sent a link to. 

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2011Jun/0186.html 

Some people are ardent believers in the separation while others see no value in it - just unnecessary complexity. And many in the industry (including Google, Facebook, etc.) rejected the separation idea in their practices even though W3C promoted it heavily. Folks who don't see the value tend to be implemented and practitioners. 

I now understand that this discussion has been going on for years.  I don't believe it would be either productive or necessary to restart it in this group. 

Irene

> On Feb 21, 2015, at 5:01 PM, Arthur Ryman <ryman@ca.ibm.com> wrote:
> 
> Irene Polikoff <irene@topquadrant.com> wrote on 02/20/2015 10:53:02 AM:
> 
>> From: Irene Polikoff <irene@topquadrant.com>
>> To: Arthur Ryman/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA, <public-data-shapes-wg@w3.org>
>> Date: 02/20/2015 10:53 AM
>> Subject: Re: "shape" as a relationship, not a class
>> 
>> I believe that ³real word object² in the Semantic Web speak doesn¹t mean
>> that it has a physical representation. It is also a concept.
>> 
>> In that sense, a user account is as much of a real world thing as a
>> person.
> 
> Irene,
> 
> I agree that the term "real-world object" is not ideal since, of course, 
> computer files, web documents are real. In [1], the universe of all 
> resources is partitioned into two disjoint sets: web documents and 
> real-world objects. So a real-world object is by definition any resource 
> that is not a web document. This means that unicorns, and other imaginary 
> concepts, are classified as real-world objects for the purposes of 
> discussing how their URIs should be handled by HTTP. If I enter the URI of 
> a unicorn in a web browser I should get a web document about unicorns.
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
>