Re: Tentative contribution to the "URI issue"

Hassan Aït-Kaci wrote:
> Michael Kifer wrote:

>> Second, in a complex KB, you always have internal predicates that 
>> shouldn't
>> be visible outside. Why should they be given a URI?
> 
> I agree even more! One detail of momentous importance that seems to escape
> anyone envioning a system where *all* identifiers and constants are URIs
> is that these are precisely that - *universal*. In other words, they
> defeat the concepts of local scoping, hiding, and modularity - something
> desirable for any respectable programming idiom. 

Agreed but as I said in a separate posting, scoping is orthogonal to 
identifier spelling. For example, in Java my inner class has a fully 
qualified classname whether or not it is public, protected or even 
private scope.

> Namespaces are a poor-man
> way of somehow working around this flatness.

Agreed. Has someone suggested that namespaces might be the sole basis 
for a scoping mechanism for RIF? I doubt it. I assume we'll want notions 
of, especially variable, scoping which are much richer than that (indeed 
I don't expect variables to be named by URIs at all).

Dave

Received on Wednesday, 21 March 2007 15:07:29 UTC