Re: getting the ball rolling (or at least providing a target to shoot at)

Le vendredi, 19 sep 2003, à 13:36 America/Montreal, Peter F. 
Patel-Schneider a écrit :
> One way of providing intended meanings for URI references in the
> Semantic Web would be to require that part of the formal meaning of a
> URI reference be the constraints embodied in the document that is
> accessible by looking up the URI reference (without any fragment) in
> the World Wide Web.


> of a URI reference.  This means that the meaning of a URI reference
> depends on which Semantic Web language is being used.

	And the level of understanding of the resource if this one is in 
natural language, it has to be understood by a human: which language, 
which pre-requisite do you impose to the reader, etc.

> Second, there might be several documents available, due to content
> negotiation, and these documents might (and probably will) incorporate
> different meanings for the URI reference.

	This can be improved, if you define that URIs should not (MUST not) be 
content negociable.
	There's another problem. In an exchange of data, you have:
	- What is delivered (Content Negociation)
	- What is understood

The classical example of that is a book or even a poetry.

	You can have a poem written in different languages and on different 
supports:
	- book
	- magazine
	- web
	- oral (in a theater, in the street, in the classroom)
This is content negociation.

	and you have the readers:
	- child
	- man/woman
	- sad or happy person
Each person will built its own interpretation of the poem depending on 
their age, their past, their desires, dreams, wishes.

When it comes to the interpretation of things, the social, emotive, 
historical, etc context is as much important as the original intended 
meaning of the poem. We are used to say that a text once it has been 
released does not belong anymore to the author in terms of 
interpretations.

An URI even without content negociation, could have different meaning 
depending on the agent receiving it and the context of it.


> URI references requires sharing world views.  Two agents in the 
> Semantic
> Web may disagree about the precise meaning of a URI reference but
> still want to communicate.  Under this view of the meaning of a URI
> reference they cannot.

The fact that the two agents disagree doesn't mean, you have an 
interoperability problem. It could also mean that they have a different 
interpretation of the world, depending on the context, on the 
philosophical point of view. You create a debate.

> This solution appears to me to have precisely the right
> characteristics, as long as documents are reasonably written.  The

The term reasonable will not make sense in case of conflict.

I think the meaning of URI, but I may be wrong, is more constrained by 
the context and for what applications they are used but more by the URI 
itself. Intended meaning and understood meaning are things which can 
have a lot of different shapes.


--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 16:06:53 UTC