RE: URI for language identifiers

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ext Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@w3.org]
> Sent: 02 April, 2003 10:34
> To: Stickler Patrick (NMP/Tampere)
> Cc: miles@milessabin.com; www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: 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.


Er, so any RDF statements using URIs that were created in violation of 
social or legal conventions of web authority are simply false?

I must not be understanding you here.

I don't see how the truth value of any RDF statement is affected by
the social or legal context of minting a URI. If I mint a URI, it
is perfectly valid in any RDF statement I use it in, and it will denote
exactly what I say it denotes, and others are free to also use that URI
to denote what I say it denotes and their statements as well are fully
valid.

Now, if I grounded that URI in a web authority I had no right to use,
there may be social and legal implications. But those are completely
disjunct from the specified denotation of that URI or the truth values
of the statements in which that URI occurs.

So in a very true sense, I *am* putting things into the RDF or OWL
vocabulary. Whether someone comes over and beats me silly with a 
big stick for doing so doesn't change the fact that I did.

Patrick

--
Patrick Stickler, Nokia/Finland, (+358 40) 801 9690, patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2003 03:42:41 UTC