- From: Peter Crowther <Peter.Crowther@melandra.com>
- Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 19:19:15 -0000
- To: "'Deborah Mcguinness'" <dlm@ksl.stanford.edu>
- Cc: RDF Logic list <www-rdf-logic@w3.org>
> From: Deborah Mcguinness [mailto:dlm@ksl.stanford.edu] > I would posit that we have not yet seen a compelling > naturally occurring > example of a need for combination of the types. Deborah, how much control did you have over versioning within CLASSIC and the systems you built around it? I agree with you for CMs where there is a centralised create-distribute-modify-redistribute approach to versioning. *The* problem with the Semantic Web, IMHO, is going to be the same as *the* problem with the HTML Web: no central authority can control the version of anything that is in use. This problem applies to standards, and gives Web authors the world over nightmares of the should-I-support-pre-CSS[2]-browsers kind; but, worse, it applies to distributed models too. At its best, this may subject us to the logical equivalent of link-rot, where the targets of URIs are either inaccessible or deleted. At its worst, it leads to part of a user base describing the world using one version of a model where (say) book titles are strings, and another part of the user base describing the world using another (later) version of the same model where (say) book titles are complex. If both publish their portions of the model using RDF, how can we reason about both at once? Or is there a bodge that treats the two versions as semi-independent? Or can we not reason about both at all? I'm sure exactly the same problem has cropped up with XML, where the DTD referred to in the DOCTYPE has changed since the data was created and the data is therefore invalid. However, I suspect the solution there ("it's still XML, so just parse it") is not one that we can apply here. - Peter -- Peter Crowther
Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2001 14:19:30 UTC