Re: AW: Distributed querying on the semantic web

From: "Leo Sauermann" <leo@gnowsis.com>
Subject: AW: Distributed querying on the semantic web
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 17:51:17 +0200

> > However, I do hope that you did not mean necessary 
> > information about the referent (denotation, meaning, ...) of 
> > the URI.  I vigorously oppose any attempt to require that 
> > part of the meaning of a URI that my applications are 
> > supposed to abide by be the meaning that can be found in a 
> > document found by dereferencing the URI.  To pick my 
> > favourite example, I do not want my applications to be 
> > required to abide by the information available at 
> > http://www.whitehouse.gov just because I use the URI 
> > http://www.whitehouse.gov/#GeorgeWBush, *even* if this 
> > information is only something like
> > 	http://www.whitehouse.gov/#GeorgeWBush rdf:type foaf:person .
> 
> this implies that you are domain owner of www.whitehouse.gov if you make
> up this fictous resource. 

Why?  What requirement is there on me that I cannot make up URI resources
from domains that I do not own?  What expectation is there that only I make
up URI resources from domains that I do own?  This seems to go right back
to the days of pre-HTML/HTTP hypertext, where there was a requirement that
I had to only use valid hypertext links.

> F.E. I have stated on http://www.gnowsis.com/wiki/GnowSis/LeoSThesis to
> use this uri to identify the thesis, although not the pdf can be found
> there. This may be good social practice, to tell people what uris to use
> for identifying concepts. State on your homepage which resources are
> identified.

Again, why?   There may be perfectly good reasons to do otherwise.

> if your applications run only on a local context, they may only use
> local uris, then your problem is also solved:
> http://database.research.bell-labs.com/#GeorgeWBush

> you then configure your "distributed querying engine" to ignore these
> local uris and contact the server directly. 
> And about highly used public uris (like f.e. the RSS schema):  You can
> also assign "alternative sources" to these resource, 
> f.e. "http://purl.org/rss/1.0/*" can be found on my local host database.
> 
> I would recommend that you are only allowed to make up URLs using
> domains you own!

I recommend otherwise.  There are many good reasons to use URI references
that are not know to have been used before and that are not in domains that
I own.  

For example, consider a situation where the WordNet information has been
put in the Semantic Web, say at http://realwordnet.org (wordnet.org having
already been taken by a religious broadcasting organization), and URI
references like http://realwordnet.org/#sailor are used in the RDF document
that contains the WordNet information.  I would like to say something about
a word that is not in WordNet (yet).  Why should I not be able to use a URI
reference like http://realwordnet.org/#Bushism?

> regards
> Leo

Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Bell Labs Research

Received on Wednesday, 21 April 2004 02:40:47 UTC