- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2002 19:37:33 -0700
- To: Michael Mealling <michael@neonym.net>
- Cc: Miles Sabin <miles@milessabin.com>, www-tag@w3.org
Michael Mealling wrote: > Given any context (belief system) you can say that it 'means' anything > you want it to mean. The issue is that there are two important sets > of contexts: one is what the authority that owns/has change control over > "www.w3.org" says is the context and the other is what others say > that believe about it. Its the difference between opinion and identity. > The W3C has the ability to say what "is" while anything said by anyone > else is merely opinion. The difference is very important. How does the W3C go about saying what the resource behind http://www.w3.org is? In a usefully machine-processable way? The only thing I see out there is RDF, so you could have an RDF assertion hosted somewhere at w3.org that says http://www.w3.org somePropSpace:isA someValSpace:webSite So your argument is that if there's another assertion using the same property and value space that contradicts this but comes from somewhere other than w3.org, a reasonable person (and the programs they write) would tend to place more weight on the version at w3.org. This can never be, of course, anything more than a general guiding principle issued for guidance to humans. If the controlling organization is at democratic... well, expecting consistency from www.senate.gov/daschle and www.senate.gov/lott is not going to work. -Tim
Received on Sunday, 4 August 2002 22:37:36 UTC