RE: URIs & Namespaces

Erik:

> sure, just tell me when to stop:
> 
> - the pool where i swim over lunch
> - the korean place where i like to eat after swimming
> - almost all neighborhood names in the bay area
> 
> and then of course all the "named places" where the place is 
> more of a social concept than the landmark kind of place that 
> gets into wikipedia. 
> wikipedia is great, but if you could listen how people use 
> place names in their everyday conversations, most of the 
> place names they use you wouldn't find in wikipedia.

Then your use-case for "place" is different than mine.  In my use-case, if
it has a URL on Wikipedia, it can have a URL assigned.  Kinda by definition,
no?  Those are the places I'm interested in.  If it is not important enough
of have a Wikipedia entry, it's not important enough for me to catalog it
(at the moment, anyway.)

> yes, but that's the effort that comunications always require: 
> you need to understand the concepts referred to by your peer, 
> otherwise you are not going to understand them. namespaces in 
> real life are infinite (almost), if you look at all the 
> languages and cultures and social groups. and sometimes they 
> make conscious efforts to invent their own "namespace", such 
> as young people talking in a way which is hard to understand 
> for adults. i think the important thing is to have some way 
> to be able to recognize when i could understand you, and that 
> can only happen when i can recognize the vocabulary you are using.

We are trying to solve different problems.  You want a way for small groups
to communicate and be damned if people outside those groups understand; I
want guidelines so that everyone can learn to communicate and be damned if
it isn't 100% perfect for everyone as long as it is 100% shared.  And both
use-cases can coexist.

I can appreciate yours; hopefully you can appreciate mine.  

> i wouldn't call my idea an "ideology", and on this mailing 
> list i am simply looking for an answer to the rather 
> technical question:

Sure what you said  is an ideology;
http://www.google.com/search?q=define:ideology  That is not a criticism as
everyone has ideologies.  I'll repeat your stated beliefs:

> but i doubt that
> 
> a) any vocabulary can reasonably assume to be complete and 
> the one everybody is using, and
> 
> b) there is one universal way of defining vocabularies that 
> works well for everybody defining them.

Those beliefs are shared by many people, and I agree in principle though not
in all contexts. I think there are contexts in which it is applicable to
find a single vocabulary.  If you believe that there is never a value for a
single vocabularty then yours is definitely an ideology (even if you are
somehow found to be right; ideologies do not have to be wrong.)  If you are
open to the possibility that your stated beliefs are open to interpretation,
then it is less of an ideology and might not be at all.  

But I am wordsmithing, and I probably shouldn't because it's tangential to
the point of discussion.

> i am simply looking for an answer to the rather 
> technical question:

Certainly. But I was referring to your dismissal of my concept; I was not
describing your question as an ideology.

> assumed it makes sense in some space of identifiable 
> resources to partition these into namespaces, identified by 
> names within that namespace. and i don't want to maintain a 
> registry for namespaces. what would be the most uri-like way 
> to do it? or is that something that out of general principle 
> never should be done within any uri scheme?

It would be helpful, at least to me, if you gave some examples that you are
considering to help me (and maybe others) visual what you are trying to
accomplish.

-- 
-Mike Schinkel
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/
http://www.welldesignedurls.org
http://atlanta-web.org 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Erik Wilde [mailto:dret@berkeley.edu] 
> Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 2:03 AM
> To: uri@w3.org
> Cc: Mike Schinkel
> Subject: Re: URIs & Namespaces
> 
> hi mike.
> 
> > Currently there already exists a universal way of defining 
> > vocabularies for placenames; it is called Wikipedia.  Can 
> you give me 
> > an example of a named place that does not have a URL on Wikipedia?
> 
> sure, just tell me when to stop:
> 
> - the pool where i swim over lunch
> - the korean place where i like to eat after swimming
> - almost all neighborhood names in the bay area
> 
> and then of course all the "named places" where the place is 
> more of a social concept than the landmark kind of place that 
> gets into wikipedia. 
> wikipedia is great, but if you could listen how people use 
> place names in their everyday conversations, most of the 
> place names they use you wouldn't find in wikipedia.
> 
> > Namespaces solve some problems in many contexts, and create huge 
> > problems in others. What I envision would actually use 
> namespaces, but 
> > if namespaces were allowed to be infinite, we'd have the 
> same problems 
> > we have with namespaces in XML; it's almost impossible to associate 
> > between two namespaces without a lots of human effort 
> involved each time.
> 
> yes, but that's the effort that comunications always require: 
> you need to understand the concepts referred to by your peer, 
> otherwise you are not going to understand them. namespaces in 
> real life are infinite (almost), if you look at all the 
> languages and cultures and social groups. and sometimes they 
> make conscious efforts to invent their own "namespace", such 
> as young people talking in a way which is hard to understand 
> for adults. i think the important thing is to have some way 
> to be able to recognize when i could understand you, and that 
> can only happen when i can recognize the vocabulary you are using.
> 
> > What you are pursuing and want I am pursing have different 
> goals. What 
> > I envision can accommodate and even enable what you want, but it 
> > sounds like you may have an ideology that disagrees with my 
> approach.  
> > If so, let's just agree to disagree as debates between 
> ideologies are rarely productive.
> > However if you do see my ideas as having potential merit, or if 
> > someone else sees them as having potential merit, I'd be very 
> > interested in discussing further, though quite possibly off list.
> 
> i wouldn't call my idea an "ideology", and on this mailing 
> list i am simply looking for an answer to the rather 
> technical question:
> 
> assumed it makes sense in some space of identifiable 
> resources to partition these into namespaces, identified by 
> names within that namespace. and i don't want to maintain a 
> registry for namespaces. what would be the most uri-like way 
> to do it? or is that something that out of general principle 
> never should be done within any uri scheme?
> 
> cheers,
> 
> dret.

Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 07:52:03 UTC