- From: Michael Kifer <kifer@cs.sunysb.edu>
- Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:33:36 -0400
- To: Dave Reynolds <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
- Cc: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Hassan_A=EFt-Kaci?= <hak@ilog.com>, W3C RIF WG <public-rif-wg@w3.org>
> 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. The bottom line is that this issue is very controversial. I can't see a good logic behind first given a universal name to an object and then trying to hide it through scoping. It seems that Hassan has the same opinion. > > 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). Variables are always scoped to rules. Giving them URI based names is a misnomer and makes no sense. I am glad that you also don't think this is useful. --michael
Received on Wednesday, 21 March 2007 15:46:31 UTC