Re: Disambiguation; keeping the "U" in "URI"

On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 03:54:36PM -0400, Nick Matsakis wrote:
> I don't understand what you mean by this.  What should the
> "Content-Location" be on an http request for the (person)
> http://www.markbaker.ca ?  "Sitting in his office chair" ?

"http://www.markbaker.ca/index.html"

Now if only I can figure out how to tell Apache to do this for me.
mod_headers isn't granular enough.

> > Re the IBM web site, I would expect that somewhere on the order of 99%
> > of all the back links to "http://www.ibm.com" are using it to identify
> > the company, not the Web page.
> 
> I think this is a matter for debate.  People like to link to a company's
> web sites in sentences that refer to the company, but this is purely a
> matter of convention;

Never underestimate the power of convention!

> any human reading the setence has no problem
> disambiguating that the link points to a website while the word (e.g.
> "IBM") in the sentence refers to the company.

Words like "web site" and "home page" just confuse discussions like
this.  They're artificial.  If 99% of a large number of people say stuff
like;

<a href="http://www.ibm.com/">IBM</a> is a good company

then that's sufficient to establish that "http://www.ibm.com/"
identifies the company.  If IBM came along later and decided that
"http://www.ibm.com/the-company" was to define the company, they'd
have a hard time doing so because convention has already decided.

This is a good thing.

>  Nonetheless, what people do
> in HTML should have negligible influence on what people do in RDF.

I disagree strongly.  It's the use of URIs, in any context, that
defines what they identify.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Wednesday, 24 April 2002 16:12:27 UTC