Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

All

Like many others it seems, I had sworn to myself : nevermore HttpRange-14,
but I will also bite the bullet.
Here goes ... Sorry I've hard time to follow-up with whom said what with
all those entangled threads, so I answer to ideas more than to people.

There is no need for anyone to even talk about "information resources".


YES! I've come with years to a very radical position on this, which is that
we have create ourselves a huge non-issue with those notions of
"information resource" and "non-information resource". Please show any
application making use of this distinction, or which would break if we get
rid of this distinction.
And in any case if there is a distinction, this distinction is about how
the URI behave in the http protocol (what it accesses), which should be
kept independent of what the URI denotes. The neverending debate will never
end as long as those two aspects are mixed, as they are in the current
httpRange-14 as well as in various change proposals (hence those
interminable threads).


> The important point about http-range-14, which unfortunately it itself
> does not make clear, is that the 200-level code is a signal that the URI
> *denotes* whatever it *accesses* via the HTTP internet architecture.
>

The proposal is that URI X denotes what the publisher of X says it denotes,
> whether it returns 200 or not.
>

This is the only position which makes sense to me. What the URI is intended
to denote can be only derived from explicit descriptions, whatever the way
you access those descriptions. And assume that if there is no such
description, the URI is intended to provide access to somewhere, but not to
denote *some* *thing*. It's just actionable in the protocol, and clients do
whatever they want with what they get. It's the way the (non-semantic) Web
works, and it's OK.


> And what if the publisher simply does not say anything about what the URi
> denotes?


Then nobody knows, and actually nobody cares what the URI denotes, or say
that all users implicitly agree it is the same thing, but it does not break
any system to ignore what it is. Or, again, show me counter-examples..

After all, something like 99.999% of the URIs on the planet lack this
> information.


Which means that for the Web to work so far, knowing what a URI denotes is
useless. But it's useful for the Semantic Web. So let's say that a URI is
useful for, or is part of, the Semantic Web if some description(s) of it
can be found. And we're done.


> What, if anything, can be concluded about what they denote?


Nothing, and let's face it.


> The http-range-14 rule provides an answer to this which seems reasonably
> intuitive.


Wonder if it can be the same Pat Hayes writing this as the one who wrote
six years ago "In Defence of Ambiguity" :)
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/irw2006/presentations/HayesSlides.pdf
Quote (from the conclusion)
"WebArch http-range-14 seems to presume that if a URI accesses  something
directly (not via an http redirect), then the URI must refer  to what it
accesses.
This decision is so bad that it is hard to list all the mistakes in it, but
here are a few :
- It presumes, wrongly, that the distinction between access and  reference
is based
on the distinction between accessible and  inaccessible referents.
 ... [see above link for full list]

Pat, has your position changed on this?


> What would be your answer? Or do you think there should not be any
> 'default' rule in such cases?
>

I would say so, because such a rule is basically useless. As useless as to
wonder what a phone number denotes. A phone number allows you to access a
point in a network given the phone infrastructure and protocols, it does
not denote anything except in specific contexts where it's used explicitly
as an identifier e.g., to uniquely identify people, organizations or
services. Otherwise it works just like a phone number should do.

Best regards

Bernard

-- 
*Bernard Vatant
*
Vocabularies & Data Engineering
Tel :  + 33 (0)9 71 48 84 59
 Skype : bernard.vatant
Linked Open Vocabularies <http://labs.mondeca.com/dataset/lov>

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