Validation and cool URIs

Peter

2014-08-01 16:44 GMT+02:00 Patel-Schneider, Peter <
Peter.Patel-Schneider@nuance.com>:

>  I don't understand.  Is it a good thing that RDF uses URIs or a bad
> thing?
>

RDF using URIs is a state of affairs, like birds wearing feathers, and
apples growing on apple-trees. Wondering if it's good or bad is pointless,
but you can't ignore it.

RDF in its philosophy and principles is not separable from the Web
architecture, which should allow anyone to figure what one commits to when
using a URI. The same URI can be used with different semantics and
different logics, defined by different documents, of course, which makes
already difficult to figure if the usage is twisting or not the original
declared semantics (and agreed, this is an issue with any language, formal
or not, there is the authority definition and the real usage) . Is the main
focus of RDF validation seems to be contexts where such documents are known
only by applications not connected with the Web, hence not accessible from
the URIs they use, as the one presented today by Holger [1]? I have nothing
against that, we've been doing it also in Mondeca for more than ten years,
using URIs under the hood of applications with specific operational
semantics, but actually I've always felt uneasy about it, because that does
not seem to be a cool way to use URIs [2].

My hope is that this group will clarify this tension between the use of
URIs on the Web and in closed environments, and not blur the landscape even
more.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-shapes/2014Aug/0040.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/