- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2002 10:51:29 -0700
- To: www-tag@w3.org
Tim Berners-Lee wrote: > Similarly, in RDF, when http://example.com/foo#bar identifies something > and there are some facts in the document http://example.com/foo about > #bar, then those facts can be deemed definitive because of the > social structure which gives the owner of the identifier a mechanism, > through > ownership of the domain and control of the server for that domain, the > ability > to control every representation of that document. Hence, any statement > on the web which is inconsistent with that document is simply wrong - > or the system has broken somewhere. Once you step outside of the domain of infrastructure facts ("was authored by", "was last changed on", "is available in PDF") I think the assertion that ownership == correctness falls apart. Once you get into the domain of interesting semantics that impact the real world, I will tend to flat disbelief of any assertions that come from the web sites of political parties, consulting accountants, and fundamentalist religions, *especially* when they are making claims about resources in their own space. In fact I may have issues with claims as basic as "authored by" & "last changed date" when made by religions about their own scriptures. > The idea that is "inevitable" that people will use the same URI to > identify different things > is true only in that is "inevitable" that people will plus 110V > appliances into 220V circuits. That is, they can't do it without > breaking the protocols. I just disagree. If I want to assert that the W3C isA vendor consortium and hasOfficesIn in Cambridge, Sophia-Antipolis, and Keio, and I do this using http://www.w3.org to represent the W3C, this will tend to just sort of work. It will work better if we all agree, for any given organization, what URI to use when talking about it, but that's an organizational not a technical problem, and in many domains such agreement is simply not achievable. > Any suggestion that it is "OK" to > just use the same URI to denote two different things, or to suggest one > has the right in a hostile way to claim to define a URI in someone > else's space, is to break the rules. I also don't think that code 404's are OK, but they happen and the architecture has to be able to handle it; if the SemWeb can't work in the presence of contradictory assertions, it can't deal with the real world and I'm not interested in it. The metaphor is compelling: hypertext systems that can't work in the presence of 404's can't deal with the real world and I'm not interested in them. As for people landgrabbing URIs in someone else's space, shouldn't this be self-defeating (especially when someone tries to dereference them)? I can see us issuing a finding that this is a Bad Thing to Do, if you think it would help. > "Er... and how do you disallow identifiers from identifying whatever > people think they identify?", you ask. > > By specifications, darn it! Can you provide some draft specification language that would live in the architecture doc that would achieve this objective? [You probably already have, but this thread has gone on too long.] -Tim
Received on Tuesday, 6 August 2002 13:51:32 UTC