RE: Documents, Cars, Hills, and Valleys

Joshua Allen wrote,
> There *will* be thousands of assertions about both the home page and 
> the company, but only if people can trust that their assertion will 
> apply to the right thing.

There already _are_ thousands of such assertions. Either people are
largely untroubled by ambguity, or, in practice, ambiguity isn't the 
disasterous problem you're making it out to be.

> If I publish assertions about http://www.microsoft.com and there are 
> some other fools using the exact same URI to publish assertions 
> about the *organization* that maintains www.microsoft.com,

Why are they fools?

> then my metadata is absolutely useless (except in my own closed 
> system).

Well, this is the status quo, and the prospects of changing it strike
me as fairly slim. So if you're right that this renders metadata
useless, we may as well pack up and go home.

My argument against this counsel of despair is that should we 
recognize ambiguous references rather than bury our heads in the sand, 
and look for mechanisms which make the problems go away, or at least
make them relatively harmless.

Some of those mechanisms already exist (eg. Accept:, or the fact that 
cars aren't electronically retrievable eliminating them as possible
referents in retrieval contexts), and others could be invented.

Cheers,


Miles

Received on Monday, 22 April 2002 18:57:13 UTC