- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2001 22:14:47 -0600
- To: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>
- Cc: <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
> > What I don't see the reasoning behind is the insistence that > > URI's should be used to name *everything*. > >So what's the alternative: string literals? The alternative is, in general, unicode character strings, or numerals, or whatever else I and the people I am communicating with might want to use to refer to anything. Hell, it might be little movie gifs one day for all I know. Why should this be restricted to some predetermined syntax? > But there is no control over >string literals, there is no agremment on what "my uncles left thumb" is. Of course not. There is no agreement about what anything accessible through a URI means, either. Any such agreement must, in the end, be a social agreement within a community to use a name in a certain way - it cannot be 'controlled' - but what we can do is post our assumptions in a publicly readable form in a publicly accessible place (which is indeed where URI's are a natural tool to use.) >But if you give that a URI, you are asserting a particular context for >which that can be used. In other words, if I use that URI, you can define >it as meaning your uncles left thumb No no, you can't have it both ways. HOW do I define it to mean my uncle's left thumb? By putting something at the location indicated by the URI which identifies my uncle's left thumb? But why don't I use that (whatever it is) directly and save you the trouble of fetching a URI? You arent going to have learned anything new about what something means just by forcing it to be sent to you by optical fiber, and neither is your software. If I want to use a URI to specify a particular context (whatever that means), then fine. But I see no reason why anyone should be *forced* to do this. >, but only in the context of whatever >tools you are using that namespace with. I think there is some confusion >between machine processability and natural language here: there are >*limits* to what machine processing can do. Believe me, I am vividly aware of what those limits are. I've been working in AI for 25 years. But machines can draw conclusions from axioms which do not use URI's, for sure. >The whole point for using URIs >is that they are decentralized; anyone can set one up. While it is true >that you can't use URIs to represent everything, you can use them to name >anything which is namable. Well, that is either trivial or false. You can, of course, put a name at a location with a URI and then use that. So in that sense URI's are universal, but that's a trivial sense, In that sense every piece of paper is in an envelope because you could put it in one. But it is not true that every possible *name* is a URI. My name is not a URI. "Boston" is not a URI, and neither is "4,367". Pat Hayes --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Monday, 5 February 2001 23:11:54 UTC