Re: URI lifecycle (Was: Owning URIs)

David Booth wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 11:07 -0700, David Huynh wrote:
>   
>> David Booth wrote:
>>     
>>> . . .  "The URI Lifecycle in Semantic Web Architecture":
>>> http://dbooth.org/2009/lifecycle/
>>> [ . . . ]
>>>       
>> David,
>>
>> I'm interested to get a sense of the coordination costs of these rules, 
>> and the costs of enforcing them, for both large publishers (company, 
>> institution) and individual authors (bloggers). (The Semantic Web is, 
>> after all, for everyone, not just large publishers.) Have you tried to 
>> follow these rules within a small group of people, preferably without 
>> Semantic Web experts?
>>
>> By coordination costs, what I mean is this. Today on the Web, if I want 
>> to point from my site to another web page, I don't have to ask anybody 
>> for permission, or sign any contract, or have any expectation, or set up 
>> any meeting, etc. Zero cost of coordination. That's very nice, and 
>> perhaps important in bootstrapping the Web. How does this mode of 
>> operation change when I need to deal with URIs? Will it be difficult 
>> enough that it will become exclusive?
>>     
>
> That's an interesting question.  Overall, I think the coordination
> requirements are similar in principle, though perhaps not in in degree.
> For example, if I were to add a link from my site to another web page I
> would likely take a look at the destination page before doing so, to
> ensure that it really says what I think it says.  This is analogous to
> Responsibility #3 ("Use of a URI implies agreement with the core
> assertions of its URI declaration"), though not exactly the same.
> However Responsibility #4 definitely goes farther ("The statement author
> making new assertions SHOULD compute the transitive closure of the URI
> declarations for all URIs used, to ensure that they are consistent with
> the author's new assertions").  But since that step can be automated in
> a tool, and since the statement author is somewhat likely to want to
> check the consistency of his/her assertions with the URI declarations
> and ontologies used anyway -- in the least to avoid embarrassment --
> this this may not be as much of an issue as it might first appear.
>
> However, I don't think "coordination" is quite the right term for the
> work that's being performed, since each of the responsibilities outlined
> in the paper is done unilaterally by one party at a time, rather than
> requiring two parties to actively engage with each other.   
>   
Thanks, David. That sounds like "zero coordination", which is great!

David

Received on Wednesday, 20 May 2009 04:14:47 UTC