Re: URI for language identifiers

* Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com <Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com> [2003-04-02 09:41+0300]
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: ext Miles Sabin [mailto:miles@milessabin.com]
> > Sent: 01 April, 2003 16:49
> > To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> > Subject: Re: URI for language identifiers
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Patrick Stickler wrote,
> > > Either you have not understood what I was saying, or you are simply
> > > wrong (or both ;-)
> > >
> > > The denotation of a given URI is that which the owner of that URI
> > > specifies. Period.
> > 
> > Umm ... likewise ;-)
> > 
> > There's no such thing as "the owner of that URI". Period.
> > 
> > The most you can say is that there's an owner of the DNS 
> > name. But for 
> > complete URIs there's no spec, no registration procedure and no 
> > possibility of legal redress which would prevent someone choosing to 
> > associate any meaning whatsoever with an arbitrary URI _without_ 
> > agreement from the owner of the embedded DNS name.
> 
> I think that if I defined a public vocabulary grounded in http://www.w3.org/
> that the W3C would send a team of lawyers to my door.
> 
> If I started adding all sorts of new properties to RDF and OWL, grounded in
> the RDF and OWL namespaces, I think that a very large, if not unanimous,
> view would be that I was invading space that does not belong to me -- i.e. that
> I have no authority or right to posit such properties using URIs grounded in
> a web authority I don't own.

I think that's a better way of talking about it than (in prev paragraph)
the physicalist metaphor of 'adding things'. You would just be making  
claims that weren't so, rather than trying and failing to 'put' things in
some sort of container.

dan

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2003 02:33:52 UTC