RE: SemWeb Non-Starter -- Distributed URI Discovery

> > > As far as I can tell, there is no formal, generalized 
> mechanism to 
> > > reliably query the owner of a URI in order to obtain an RDF 
> > > Description of that URI.  And this is a serious impediment to the 
> > > Semantic Web.
> > 
> > I think this hits the nail on the head.  
> 
> Actually, I think this completely misses the point.  If you must know
> the owner of the URI to get a description of it, it is NOT 
> the "semantic
> web".
> 
> This would be like saying that you have to know the owner of 
> the URI in
> order to see any links to that URI.  Such an idea would have 
> completely
> destroyed the WWW as we know it.  Same is true of SW.

... yeah but, to make the WWW work you have to 'know' how to get an 'authoritative' representation of a resource (implicit in HTTP).  So surely to make SW you need some way of getting (or better, querying) an 'authoritative' RDF description of a resource?

SW certainly needs a way of discovering an RDF datasource that was 'said' by a particular legal entity (i.e. person, organisation etc.) ... and identifying a legal entity will often be done indirectly (i.e. find me a datasource that describes X that was said by the legal entity that owns the domain name Y).

Cheers,

Al.

Received on Friday, 1 April 2005 15:52:10 UTC