Re: Defining URIs - was 2 resources

Quoting Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>:

> 
> >Hence anyone who can coin URIs (uneasily governed by being in charge of a
> >domain name) can coin a URI to identify anything.
> 
> Well, technically anyone can define something about a URI - it is what
> rdf:about does, whether you are in charge of the domain part or not...

That's half of the unease in "uneasily governed", the other half being issues of
secure "ownership" of the domain.

Of course in natural language anyone can say anything about anything (laws about
libel, hate-speech, and interferring with the profitability of large music
corporations being limits applied after the fact), and we generally consider
this a good thing (or better than the alternative). In the case of natural
language used by humans while people may disagree to the point of bloodshed
there are certain opinions so lunatic that they just drop out of the discourse;
as a rule we manage to agree on enough that we can work out what we are
disagreeing about. This is perhaps a matter of the number of agents engaged in
the discourse.

-- 
Jon Hanna
<http://www.hackcraft.net/>
"…it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for
equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people." - jargon.txt

Received on Wednesday, 14 April 2004 10:48:01 UTC