Re: Explaining the benefits of http-range14 (was Re: [HTTP-range-14] Hyperthing: Semantic Web URI Validator (303, 301, 302, 307 and hash URIs) )

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 8:34 AM, Lin Clark <lin.w.clark@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 1:15 PM, Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> If you adopt the httpRange-14 rule, what this does is make the Flickr
>> and Jamendo pages "wrong", and if *they* agree, they will change their
>> metadata. The eventual advantage is that there will be no need to be
>> clear since a different URI (or blank node) will clearly be used to
>> name the photo, and will be understood in that way.
>>
>> I feel you're doing a bait-and-switch here. The topic is, what does
>> the httpRange-14 rule do for you, NOT whether a different rule (such
>> as "just read the RDF") is better than it for some purposes, or what
>> sort of agreement might we want to attempt. If you want to do a
>> comparison of different rules, please change the subject line.
>>
>
> I don't think this was a bait-and-switch. I think Leigh made clear that he
> was questioning whether we should spend so much time making pages (and
> people) "wrong".

Come on, I never said making someone wrong was a virtue. I was just
answering honestly the question, what would happen to those pages if
we adopted the rule? Well, those pages would break. That would be sad.
Jamendo and Flickr are negative examples. This is a criticism of the
rule. Maybe that's enough reason to amend the rule, I don't know. If
you adopted a different rule, something else would break, like an
application that reports on the content of RDF pages. Because current
practice is so mixed, we will never end up with 100% compliance with
ANY rule, even one that says that all references are indirect. But
that's not what we were talking about.

I wasn't trying to argue in favor or against compared to alternatives.
I was only trying to answer the question that was asked, which was
what does it do for you. Like all rules, it lowers entropy, and does
it in a certain way that supports certain uses and doesn't support
other uses.

> As he said:
>>
>> Instead of starting out from a position that we *must* have two different
>> resources, can we
>> instead highlight to people the *benefits* of having
>> different identifiers?
>
> Telling someone they are wrong because they don't follow a rule that they
> don't understand or don't see a benefit to is a *must* position. Explaining
> how the httpRange-14 rule is better than another is explaining the
> *benefits* of having different identifiers.
> -Lin

There's a different question that I skipped over because it seems
unrelated, which is whether you need different URIs for different
things. I'm not certain how to answer that. This is an
interoperability issue. If a URI U refers to two documents A and B,
and I say <U> has title "Right", which document am I referring to, A
or B? That is, which has that title? (or author, etc.) Either you
don't care, in which case there's no reason to say it, or you care, in
which case you have to invent some additional signal to communicate
the distinction.

The question of how many URIs you need has almost nothing to do with
httpRange-14. It would arise no matter how you ended up choosing
between direct vs. indirect.

Jonathan

Received on Friday, 21 October 2011 13:18:11 UTC