Re: Announcement: "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" - W3C SWEO IG Note

Hi Pat,

I picked up your recommendations for changes, but its not sure 
if/when/how we update the public document.


It was Pat Hayes who said at the right time 09.04.2008 07:12 the 
following words:
> Nice document. A few quibbles:
>
> -----------
>
> "Given such a URI, how can we find out what it identifies? We need 
> some way to answer this question, because otherwise it will be hard to 
> achieve interoperability between independent information systems. "
>
> I know you probably don't want to get involved with philosophical 
> issues, but this sentence is so wrong as to be misleading. We CANNOT 
> POSSIBLY find out what any name identifies, other than by being 
> explicitly handed the thing or being pointed to it (as in the 
> pre-semantic Web). The best we can POSSIBLY do is to have a detailed 
> enough description of the thing for our purposes; but no description 
> can completely identify a single thing. So your second sentence above 
> is particularly misleading: it suggests that the Web will not work 
> unless we all do something impossible before breakfast.
>
> Moreover, getting involved with this highly debatable issue isn't 
> needed, to motivate the subsequent content of the note. The point is 
> not that we need to be able to discover what exactly it is that 
> non-document URIs denote. The central point is only that, pretty much 
> by definition, they denote/ something that isn't a document/, which is 
> why we need to distinguish the URI for the thing from a URI for any 
> document/"information resource" which describes the thing. You can 
> avoid the philosophical/semantic tar-pit of the nature of reference 
> and how it can be determined, by sticking to this basic point in your 
> introduction.
good point, but if you see the single sentence in the context of the 
whole document, it is clear that we talk about the distinguishment 
between documents and things, and a way to discriminate amongst them.

>
> ------------
>
> "When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can 
> reduce a client's performance considerable."
>
> This sentence is not grammatical English. Rewrite to:
>
> When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can 
> considerably reduce a client's performance.
>
> or:
>
> When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can 
> reduce a client's performance to a considerable degree.
done, thx!

>
> -----------
>
> Section 4.4 , first paragraph, has a misleading rhetorical structure. 
> It says that hash URIs can be used so that a family of URIs share a 
> non-hash part, then observes that this approach has a downside, then 
> presents 303 as an alternative which avoids the problem. But of course 
> one can avoid this problem while still using hash URIs, simply by NOT 
> having a family of URIs which share the non-hash part. You present 
> this idea later in the section, but describe it, misleadingly, as 
> 'combining 303 and hash'. As far as I can see, 
> http://www.example.com/bob#this has nothing to do with 303: it is a 
> straightforward use of a hash URI.
>
> It is also a beautifully simple and uniform way to handle the whole 
> issue, by the way, avoiding all this 303-redirect craziness at a 
> single elegant stroke. You ought to make more of it.
yes, # is also the preferred way of hosting the content for TimBl and 
others.
Still, /-uris look aesthetically better, (if you dig this), and the part 
after the # is never sent to the server, if you need that, 303 is needed.

will not change the paragraph, but the point is true.

thank you for the feedback!

best
Leo
>
> ------------
>
> Best wishes
>
> Pat Hayes
> -- 
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