concepts: social meaning of URIs isn't novel to RDF

The new section
2.3.3 Interaction between social and formal meaning
in the concepts doc is great stuff...

http://www.ninebynine.org/wip/RDF-concepts/Latest/rdf-concepts.html#section-Social
18 October 2002

But I think it's missing an important point
when it says

"Note that this argument depends on another social convention of RDF,
which is that URIs 'belong to' somebody who has authority and
responsibility for defining their meanings."

That social convention comes from the combination
of the URI spec and (in this case) the HTTP spec.

The URI spec[RFC2717,RFC2396] is an agreement about how
the internet community allocates names and associates them with
protocols by which they take on meaning; the HTTP
URI scheme[RFC2616*] uses DNS in such a way that the
names take on meaning by way of messages from
the domain holder (or somebody they delegate to).
While other communications (documents, messages, ...)
may suggest meanings for such names, it's a local
policy decision whether those suggestions should
be heeded, while the meaning obtained thru
HTTP GET is, by internet-wide agreement, authoritative.

*section 3.2.2 in particular
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.2.2


Hmm... I didn't start that as suggested wording for
the spec, but maybe you can use it as such.

p.s.

use of http://schmuk.org/ conflicts with the W3C manual
of style:

* Domains in examples must adhere to section 3, "Reserved Example Second
Level Domain Names," in RFC 2606 [DOMAINS]. Use the domains example.com,
example.org, and example.net for all examples. The Internet Assigned
Numbers Authority (IANA) reserves them for this purpose. If you need an
evocative name, use a machine name (e.g., http://cats.example.org).

 -- http://www.w3.org/2001/06/manual/



-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 24 October 2002 10:17:35 UTC