Re: [httpRange-14] What do HTTP URIs Identify?

At 04:26 PM 7/31/02 -0500, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>>>Again, you are confusing the ability for a web page to identify a donkey
>>>with the requirement that it does. I would argue that the web page only
>>>identifies the donkey if one was careful to state that it did. An
>>>example of such a page is: http://logicerror.com/myWeavingTheWeb
>>So what, sir, is the algorithm for determining that no one had carefully
>>stated tha a web page was a donkey?
>
>Visiting the page and reading through it. As I said, as we move into the 
>Semantic Web we'll need RDF properties and HTTP headers to provide this 
>information in a machine-processable way, but that's true about many 
>things. I don't see how that's a deal-breaker.

Maybe that's the killer here?  If you can only determine the meaning of 
some RDF when online and able to visit the page, that greatly reduces the 
utility of RDF, IMO.

And yes, I see that one can always find *more* information when online, and 
it may be necessary to do this to reach some particular goal, but I think 
the meaning inherent in some piece of RDF should not be dependent on such 
additional discovery.

Example:

    <http://example.org/myCar> ex:colour ex:Red .

Suppose that I already know that ex:colour and ex:Red are to be interpreted 
as describing the colour of the subject resource in the way that we (as 
English speaking people) might expect.  Am I to conclude that:
    the web page at <http://example.org/myCar> is substantially red?
Or
    a car described by the web page at <http://example.org/myCar> is 
substantially red?

...

I suspect that in practice we may not always be able to achieve a level of 
stand-alone clarity of reference, but it seems reasonable to me that we 
should aim for that as a goal.

#g


-------------------
Graham Klyne
<GK@NineByNine.org>

Received on Thursday, 1 August 2002 04:08:43 UTC