Re: Yorick Wilks on Semantic Web & httpRange-14

On 18 May 2012, at 20:04, Larry Masinter wrote:

>> You are not using URIs but strings, so you can't understand what is going on.
> 
> OK, you want me to use a URI, by which I assume you mean the thing defined by RFC 3986.
> 
>> Here, instead try finding out what the meaning of http://bblfish.net/people/henry/card#me 
>> is. 
> 
> http://bblfish.net/people/henry/card#me  as a URI has a well-defined
> meaning in most contexts, basically:
> 
>  Connect to host bblfish.net using the http protocol on port 80, and
>  communicate with it using the path "/people/henry/card".  If you are
>  GET-ing something, then take the results of an HTTP GET; based
>  on the content-type of the entity that returns from a 200, and following
> definition of the media type to focus on the results of interpreting
> "me" as a fragment.
> 
> That's about all you can get from it being a "URI" and not just some string
> like "slithy toves".  

It's quite a lot. You then would a graph containing the following relations:
   
   @prefix : <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
   @prefix bblfish: <#> .
   @prefix cert: <http://www.w3.org/ns/auth/cert#> .
   @prefix contact: <http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/contact#> .

   bblfish:me     a :Person;
         pingback:to <http://webid.fcns.eu/notification.php>;
         contact:home  [
             a contact:ContactLocation;
             contact:address  [
                 contact:city "Fontainebleau";
                 contact:country "France";
                 contact:postalCode "77300";
                 contact:street "21 rue Saint Honore" ];
             geo:lat "48.404532";
             geo:long "2.700448" ];
         cert:key  [
             a cert:RSAPublicKey;
             cert:exponent 65537;
             cert:modulus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http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#hexBinary> ];
         :aimChatID "unbabelfish";
         :birthday "07-29";
         :currentProject </work/atom-owl/2006-06-06/>,
                <https://bloged.dev.java.net/>,
                <https://sommer.dev.java.net/>;
         :depiction <http://farm1.static.flickr.com/164/373663745_e2066a4950.jpg>;
         :family_name "Story";
         :gender "male";
         ...

You'd also get my public social network, which you could dereference, and if that social network
overlaps with yours, then you could decide to trust the information enough to call me, or mail me,
or verify my public key etc.... And here I am speaking about me, the physical, biological, 
person here writing this very email.



>  If some other context, protocol, document format, environment wants to use it for more than that,
> then it's up to that context to define how it applies to that context.
> 
> I use xmlns=" http://bblfish.net/people/henry/card#me" in an XML
> document, XML provides another context, the URI is being used
> as a namespace name. 
> 

Of course a URI is a syntactic object, which requires it to be embedded in some form
of discourse where the role it is playing is clear, or can be guessed at: as in a
novel where a  detective were to find the url above on the scene of a crime on a 
sheet of paper found in the chimney still hot from its recent burning.

>> I would suggest writing out a foaf profile and you'll soon enough see how it
>> works. You can add me as foaf:knows . If you don't know what foaf:knows means, then
>> just dereference it. It's full url is http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/knows
> 
> Ooops, sorry, I got all this stuff but then my internet connection went down.
> Does that mean I have to stop processing?  Ooops, sorry, xmlns.com seems 
> to have been hijacked... does the semantic web stop working?

Not any more than if w3c went down the web would stop working. What would happen
though is that you would not know what that URL meant. 

If the Web went down all the time, we could imagine the world prior 1990 to have
been a world in which that was the case, then of course agreeing on exchanging meanings
via URLs would not be an interesting endeavour. 

> 
>> That it works is as clear as day to anyone using the linked data version of the semantic
>> web. But like all technical objects they have to be used to see how they work. 
> 
> Since we're still trying to discover what you mean by "it", the assertion
> that "it works"  isn't "clear as day".

Is your internet not working or are you just pretending it is not? 
Perhaps we should wait for your internet to work again before we continue. 

Otherwise you are confusing semantics with epistemology. The URL means something,
but you don't know what. Like the detective with the sheet of paper, he does not
know what role that may play. But detectives at least try to get to the truth of 
the matter.
> 
> 
> I asked:
>> What is the "efficient, scalable" way in which A, B and C communicate
>> in order to all agree to use D's definition? How is their agreement
>> "easy" ? I mean, if they could agree to use D's definition, why can't
>> they agree to use A's definition instead? Or B's? 
> 
> Didn't see any reply.
> 
>> I don't see any use cases at all in 
>> http://www.w3.org/wiki/UriDefinitionDiscoveryProtocol
>> so it's hard for me to understand what problem you think you are solving with it.
> 
> Still looking for a use case.

Well it would be easy to set up a game in which people wrote up definitions
of URLs posted them and exchanged information with RDF (and no text in the RDF,
and only opaque URLs). Using the above method, assuming a working internet, 
and good definitions, they would be able to reconstitute the message.

In fact we do this all the time. So there is no need for you to search for use
cases. We have found it, and we are using it.

Henry

> 
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Friday, 18 May 2012 19:43:37 UTC