Re: An intuition pump

I remember that when I first learned that I would someday receive a 
"Doctor of philosophy" degree (instead of Dr. of Science) I was quite 
disappointed.  However, I then learned that pragmatism was a 
legitimate branch of philosophy and having read Dewey and a few other 
folks like that [*] I decided I could live with ...

SUMMARY:
I bring this up because in my simple, and somewhat pragmatic world 
view, the current discussion makes me uncomfortable - it borders on 
"aesthetic" rather than practical -- what I'd really like to see is 
if we could expose a couple of "test cases" where it makes a 
difference.

DETAILS:

Let me try this:
  I see URIs as a nearly infinitely large addressable memory - we have 
a naming convention to avoid simply numbering the spaces -- i.e.
  http://www.sally/RDFDocument#person is just a short form for
"Web memory location 33290948209842398"
we then have bits that live inside these memory locations.

Stating the obvious, it seems to me the goal of this group is to say 
something about the ownership of these memory addresses and the 
relation of that to what is contained in the locations.

So Mary's person and Sally's person are different boxes -- the fact 
that Mary says in her box that Sally is wrong in hers seems to me to 
be a difficult issue in the aesthetic world of words and meanings, 
but not in the pragmatic world of boxes and their contents -- as long 
as my machine can tell me whether I'm looking in Mary's memory 
location or Sally's, then I can tell who is doing the asserting.  If 
Mary asserts something about Sally who asserts something about Bijan 
who asserts something about Pat, etc -- I don't have a problem.

Seems to me the issue of what is in the boxes is different -- in my 
naive way I read the TAG issue as "Is the owner of a box responsible 
for what it says in that box"   (and what if that points at another 
box)

I guess in my stupidly naive way, I don't see why this is drastically 
different than if on my Web Page I claim (in words) Bijan is my 
employee and on his Web Page he claims (in words) that he is my 
underpaid slave.    We each are able to state our intended meanings, 
someone pointing to my page can tell the difference from if they are 
pointing to Bijan's page, and those referring to things on the pages 
have to be careful they point at the right place.  I can steal 
content from Bijan's page, I can cut and paste from Bijan's page, the 
one thing I cannot do is "coopt" Bijan's page in any way that will 
fool your software.

(I admit that I could fire Bijan, keep the URI he has, and change 
what it says - but that seems to me to be an extreme case and one way 
beyond the call of our software to handle. (It seems to me some of 
Bijan's intution pump is based on a scenario more like this one, 
which is why I mention it))

Anyway, my problem is that given my simple world view, I cannot find 
any interesting examples where Tim's solution would make smart people 
like Bijan and Peter so upset, yet it clearly does, which is why I 
ask for examples that can help a simpleton like me understand what 
the pragmatic effects are

  -JH
p.s. So I guess there are two ways to convince me - get me to change 
my simple worldview, which many of you can testify is hard :->, or 
show me an example of a hard problem that I can understand from my 
naive stance - a much easier task :->



[*] but I never liked Pierce :->
-- 
Professor James Hendler				  hendler@cs.umd.edu
Director, Semantic Web and Agent Technologies	  301-405-2696
Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab.	  301-405-6707 (Fax)
Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742	  *** 240-277-3388 (Cell)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/hendler      *** NOTE CHANGED CELL NUMBER ***

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 08:48:09 UTC