RE: on documents and terms [was: RE: [WNET] new proposal WN URIs and related issues]

>Hi David,
>
>>  Just to avoid confusion, DanC and I are addressing a little
>>  different issue.  DanC and Pat and I are discussing:
>>
>>	What is an "information resource"?
>>
>>  Whereas you are talking about the issue:
>>
>>	Is is okay to use the same URI both as the name of
>>	a resource and as the name of a Web page that describes
>>	that resource?  Example: Is it okay for Mark Baker to
>>	use http://markbaker.ca/ as a name for himself *and*
>>	for his blog Web page?
>
>Exactly! And I am saying that they are inseparable. That's why I ended my
>post with:
>
>   I feel this is important because in my opinion, none of the
>   recent discussion has got to the root of the issue, and without
>   this, talk of trying to 'clarify' what 'information resource'
>   means leads to a lot of confusion. Issues like whether the
>   *content* of the resource change over time, etc., are as far as
>   I can see, irrelevant to the issue.
>
>In other words, I'm saying that the very fact that discussions abound as to
>whether the URI <http://markbaker.ca> can represent both a person *and* a
>web-page, show that people are misunderstanding the notion of 'information
>resource'.

Not necessarily. It might mean that some people are tolerant of 
ambiguity. Or, it might mean that some people think that the 
distinction between a person and an information resource is clear, 
but that there are two different notions of 'represent' being 
confused in statements like this. So the same URI might - I had 
better not say 'represent', so - *identify* the information resource 
but *denote* the person, at the same time. And if indeed identifying 
and denoting are distinct then this is not an ambiguity, nor 
necessarily a problem that needs to be solved. It hasn't seem to have 
been much of a problem so far, at any rate. As you say in your blog 
http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/ (thanks for the pointer), "at the 
moment, millions of web pages break this fundamental principle...". 
Stop right there. If millions of web pages are working fine, while 
violating a 'principle', then the thing to do is to re-examine the 
principle. Maybe its not so fundamental after all.

So, read on. You predict that trouble is coming:
"These processors can get away with [breaking the information 
resource/resource distinction] though, because they are running 
distinct 'silos' of data... But if you try to mix the two databases 
you'll get trouble, because you'll find that the URI of my blog is 
being overloaded to represent me, a person, the house for sale, and 
of course, a web-page."

OK, suppose that you do. Now, what is wrong with overloading? 
Programming languages do it all the time. Natural languages do it all 
the time. Formal logical languages (like Common Logic and its recent 
offspring IKL) do it: a CL name can represent an individual, a 
function of any arity and a relation of any arity, all at the same 
time (in IKL add a proposition to the list.) In every case, it works 
because there is an adequate way to disambiguate every use of the 
overloaded name, if it needs to be disambiguated. In English, the 
surrounding context tells you whether 'rose' is something moving 
upwards in the past, or a flower. In CL, the syntax tells you if the 
name is being used in a relational way. And so on. You only get 
trouble - and not in fact always then -  if you overload in a way 
that cannot be disambiguated, but all the examples I've seen can be. 
If I tell my banker to put in a bid for the real property referred to 
by <insert URI>, then what agent, human or software, is going to be 
confused about my meaning or intentions? Will I accidentally buy you, 
or your website? If I tell my email handler to email a message to 
<insert same URI>, what will go wrong? Will an email message get sent 
to your webpage or your house, instead of to you? If I do an http GET 
with the URI, am I in any danger of being sent you or your house or 
even your mailbox? (If someone were to use the same URi for two 
websites, or for two different people, there would be a real cause 
for worry: but those cases aren't what we are discussing here.)

Your conclusion welcomes disambiguation moving us "away from the 
world of having to rely on lots of pockets of implicit knowledge", 
but it doesn't. This is the most fundamental point: when we start 
relying on descriptions, rather than transfer protocols, to fix 
referents, as we *must* when we want to refer to non-information 
resources (i.e. virtually everything in the universe), there is 
absolutely no way, in principle, to avoid relying on implicit 
knowledge, be it in 'pockets' or not. This is often called the 
'grounding problem' in KR discussions: the fact that names in 
descriptions are *inherently* ambiguous about what they refer to. And 
the more you let yourself say about them - the more distinctions you 
let yourself make by using a richer descriptive vocabulary - the more 
ambiguous they get. We all know that 'bank' is ambiguous. How many 
meanings does it have? Three or four? One of them is a thing like 
Barclays, right? But if you let yourself talk about places and times 
and types of things and social topics, and so on, you can start 
distinguishing between the bank as institution, as legal entity, as a 
building, as the location of the building, as the interior of the 
building, as the contents of the building, as a role played by the 
agents who are employed by the institution, etc., etc.. Do we have to 
have distinct URIs for all of them? Its no good protesting that you 
don't care about such pedantic distinctions: URIs have global scope, 
so as long as *somebody* wants to make the distinction, it needs to 
get made by *everyone*. And as long as the TAG insists that URIs 
refer unambiguously, then no URI is safe, because there isn't any way 
to know when you finally get something pinned down uniquely. Arguably 
things like social security numbers serve to identify people 
uniquely, but that's not good enough. I can point you at practicing 
ontologists who will argue about what a person really is, and have 
incompatible formalizations of personhood. Do they have to use 
different URIs to refer to me with, because one of them thinks I'm a 
continuant and the other thinks I have temporal parts? Or can we 
tolerate a certain ambiguity here?

To set out with torch and sword in hand to eliminate all ambiguity on 
the Web is about as constructive as setting out to travel to infinity 
and beyond. It just ain't going to work for non-information 
resources, which can't be wholly characterized by a single finite 
message. There is nothing you or I or anyone else can do about this, 
so let's stop trying.

>Or to put it another way...it doesn't matter which of the two
>issues you answer, yours or mine, answering one will answer the other.
>
>In passing, I have to say that anyone who is trying to follow all of this
>and is confused by the issues...I don't blame you! I don't think it has been
>explained very well, and as is often the case with subtle things like this,
>people seem to keep repeating the *conclusions*, without reminding the rest
>of us how they were arrived at.

I would give a lot to know how the TAG arrived at its conclusions. I 
have tried to discover the historical roots of the WebArch 
terminology such as 'resource', 'identify', 'represent' and 'name', 
and have not been able to track it down. Engelbart, for example, is 
often cited as the source for the term 'resource', but it seems clear 
that he had a much narrower conception in mind, roughly what WebArch 
refers to as an information resource. The idea that a resource is 
'anything with an identity', whatever that means, seems to have 
arisen spontaneously somewhere within the W3C around the turn of the 
millennium, and has no detectable connection with any earlier 
writings or traditions. Similarly, the WebArch notion of 'represent' 
has no apparent connection with any earlier useage of that word in 
philosophy, logic, Krep or computer science.

Pat

>
>Regards,
>
>Mark
>
>
>Mark Birbeck
>CEO
>x-port.net Ltd.
>
>e: Mark.Birbeck@x-port.net
>t: +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
>b: http://internet-apps.blogspot.com/
>w: http://www.formsPlayer.com/
>
>Download our XForms processor from
>http://www.formsPlayer.com/


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Received on Thursday, 4 May 2006 21:06:28 UTC