Re: URI etymology

On Mon, 11 Jun 2001, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

>Onto cases where URLs represent both a "namespace" and also return a
>document. That document is simply a representation of a resource, not
>the resource itself, so is there really any problem there?

It is a problem in that those representations are resources in their own
right. Following the same logic, we might argue that a picture of a person
is a representation of that person. Yet, if you want to process both people
and images in your SW app, you run into trouble when you want to tell that
the person and the image have different names, belong to different classes
and that one of sizes at 120x100 pixels grayscale. In the case of documents
defining namespaces, there might be more than one, each with their own RDF
descriptions. Even such basic metadata as the Dublin core will likely be
different for each of the representations, and still different from the
description of the namespace itself. Not to mention any inference rules one
might come up with.

I do know that this sort of reasoning has a somewhat puritanian feel to it,
but once you have a SW running where other people, or worse yet,
applications written by other people, need to use your data, you start to
bump into the finer grained semantic distinctions. It seems to me that
thinking ahead is the easiest way to avoid future confusion.

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front

Received on Tuesday, 12 June 2001 05:14:08 UTC