- From: Chris Purcell <cjp39@cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 16:59:21 +0100
- To: "Hamish Harvey" <david.harvey@bristol.ac.uk>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> This debate has caused a decided shift in my understanding of this
> issue. There follows a summary. Comments and flames the very purpose of
> posting. Am I missing the point? Making some rudimentary mistake?
If you are, so am I. I was just going to post a similar message when
yours appeared. I don't agree with all your conclusions, though.
> It is here that the need for this distinction seems clearest. Witness:
>
> <http://www.paris.org/Monuments/Eiffel> ex:resultOfDereferencing
> <http://www.paris.org/Monuments/Eiffel> .
>
> at which point meaning disappears up its own anus. It isn't clear that
> there is anything in the world of the web that can be the result of
> dereferencing itself.
One could accuse you of excess pedantry here. ex:resultOfDereferencing
as a predicate can mean "the subject is the result of shoving the URI
of the object through any known, applicable de-referencing mechanism".
This is quite clear, and will confuse neither generic RDF engine nor
any software which understands the predicate.
Many existing RDF applications have the implicit assumption:
for all x that can be de-referenced, <x ex:resultOfDerefencing x>
holds
and that this assumption violates the statement in the RDF Primer:
RDF uses URIrefs only to identify things, while browsers also use
URIrefs to retrieve things
However, we don't need to conform to this requirement in the definition
of ex:resultOfDereferencing.
Chris
Received on Tuesday, 21 September 2004 16:00:13 UTC