RE: "Resource" (RDF vocabulary definitions)

>>Out of curiosity, is there anything explicitly stated in the
>document suite
>>that would stop:
>>
>><rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example.org/aaa">
>>
>>referring to the document at the URL
>>
>>http://example.org/bbb
>>
>>and
>>
>><rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example.org/bbb">
>>
>>referring to the document at the URL
>>
>>http://example.org/aaa
>>
>>?
>
>We're working on that.

Glad to hear it ;-)

 There's nothing in the formal semantics AFAIK, but
>that would clearly be perverse in a practical situation.
>
>There are some words about defining authority in RDF-concepts that we're
>trying to get into the right form so that they recognize the real-life
>context that associates an HTTP URI with what you get on dereferencing.

That's good - I'll be interested to see how you cover it.

>Part of the challenge here, I think, is to get the formalisms
>right so that
>they don't come over as artefacts in the real world.  So even if the
>perversity you describe is possible, and behaves in a logically consistent
>fashion, that doesn't mean anyone would want to use it that way.  What is
>important, I think, is that the things we do want to do also behave in a
>logically consistent fashion.

Yes, that's how I'd read it too.

Thanks for the response, I'm glad to hear that you're still working on
sticky bits like this.

Incidentally, I was chatting to the wife about this earlier and was
struggling to express the bits where I had doubts. At one point she came out
with rather a nice analogy for something, (though I've not yet figured out
what!) - it went something like this: "It's as if you had an avatar in a
virtual world, that could go and ask a barman in that world a question and
come back and give you the information. But obviously you couldn't go into
the virtual world and ask yourself...".

Maybe the greater 'reality' that URLs seem to have compared to name-only
URIs may add to the confusion of the likes of me. Turning it around kind of
fits better - considering the RDF names to be the reality and the retrieved
representations as coming from barmen in cyberspace ;-)

Cheers,
Danny.

Received on Wednesday, 27 November 2002 16:26:53 UTC