- From: Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>
- Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 12:50:20 -0500
- To: Pierre-Antoine CHAMPIN <champin@bat710.univ-lyon1.fr>, RDF Interest <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>, RDF Logic <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
Pierre-Antoine CHAMPIN <champin@bat710.univ-lyon1.fr> wrote: > There is a recurring debate on both RDF lists about URIs, what they > mean, and how some problems with RDF come from problems with them. I think the major confusion in this document is the mistaken belief that a network entity is the same as the resource. As in this passage: Uniform Resource Identifiers or URIs [1,3] have first been designed to offer a global and uniform mechanism to identify network accessible resources. More recently, the will to achieve the Semantic Web [2], and more particularly the Resource Description Framework (RDF) [11] made it a base vocabulary to describe not only network accessible resources, but any resource. Resources were technically never "network accessible" -- only renderings of them into formats that can be transferred over the network. True, XML can probably represent pretty close to (if not actually) 100% of the actual content of a resource, but this is still merely an electronic rendition of an abstract ideal. The same is true with namespaces, people, etc. I cannot send a "namespace" over the wire, but I can send an XSchema or a RDDL description. I cannot send myself, but I can send a textual description or a picture. This seems to be a major source of confusion. -- [ Aaron Swartz | me@aaronsw.com | http://www.aaronsw.com ]
Received on Tuesday, 10 April 2001 13:50:41 UTC