Re: What to do about namespace derived URI refs... (long)

> > [..] for as long as URLs are around and people can use
> > them in RDF, they will be used - you can't stop that from
> > happening, and rightfully so.
>
> Well, I'll agree that it's going to be darn hard if not impossible
> to stop, [...]

It's going to be impossible. How are you going to stop people? By
issuing a decree? The only way to get people to stop is if the entire
world (or a good percentage of it at least) agree that using a URI
reference who's base just happens to be a URL is wrong for identifying
arbitrary concepts, and as that is clearly not the case, it isn't
going to happen.

> But will they work for everything they have to work for
> in the SW?

It depends what you mean by "the SW". If you mean a machine
processable environment built on top of RDF and URIs that identify RDF
resources, then yes, I think that is a fair assumption to make.

> But references to concepts cross-media is essential to the SW!

Only if those concepts are grounded in the media themselves, and if
so, then you should be able to model that quite well. Here is a model
of an XHTML <title> element, by DanC on the RDF IG IRC channel:-

   { :r1 a http:Reply; :from :r2; :content :bytes.
      :bytes :xmlParseAs :dom;
     :dom [ :xpath "html/head/title" ] :t }
   log:implies { :r xhtml:title :t }.

You can do this sort of thing because RDF can say anything about
anything. The power comes from the lack of bottleneck contraint rules.

> How do folks expect intellegent agents to trully communicate
> if there are no reliable mechanisms for cross-media references
> to shared concepts?!

Use a URN if you want. Just don't (attempt) to force people who have
build software that can grok any type of URI/URI-Reference as an
identifier for an RDF resource to grok some subset of URIs. That's
just rediculous.

> Furthermore, who says what the "official" standard URI ref
> for the ISO 3166-1 language "Finland" is? The only official
> ISO specification is in print only. All online (URL referencable)
> definitions are unofficial -- and they vary from HTML to text
> to CSV, etc.

I fail to see your point here.

[...]
> > Does this mean that the RDF, RDF Schema, DAML,
> > Dublin Core, FOAF, DCTypes, EARL, Annotea and
> > so on namespaces are broken?
>
> IMHO, yes.

Maybe you should try using the tools, and then reply again. Has the
Annotea annotations server "broken" just because you say using URLs
with FragId is wrong?

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Thursday, 7 June 2001 11:42:37 UTC