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

Hmm.  It seems that all the identifier can do is 
identify the authority and the thing asserted by 
that authority.  This doesn't argue meaning other 
than THAT explicit source asserts THIS.

That is ok.  It doesn't get around having a 
minimal two-level system with regards to 
interpretive meaning.  One cannot dispute that 
this authority says this, but one has to rely  
on 

1.  Further assertions from that authority 
for interpretations

2.  Other assertions that point to that 
authority's assertions.

Again, nothing wrong with that.

I believe that we have come to some kind 
of consensus here that strongly suggests 
why the use of technologies such as RDDL 
and RDF have value:  to annotate and 
correlate the interpretations.  As has 
been stated, the use of the URI to point 
to a separate interpretive document is 
not mandated, but very useful.  The 
role of the URI in the XML namespace as 
a syntactical device to disambiguate names 
is fixed, not arguable.  The use of it 
to cite an interpretive document is not 
fixed, but it is wise.   To know what 
some authority asserts it means, we have 
to ask the cat.

The problem, of course, is to separate 
the ownership of the assertion from the 
ownership of the knowledge.  The Semantic 
Web will be a disaster if we can't do that. 
I don't think the solution is technical; 
it is legal.  It is also a different issue.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill de hOra [mailto:dehora@eircom.net]

> From: Tim Berners-Lee [mailto:timbl@w3.org] 
>
> However, on the web one *does* have a way to own and be the 
> authority on an identifier,  and there is no right of a third 
> party to argue that it means something else.

... Ok. What's good about that it squares with REST principles. While I
don't see how we make people always do the right thing, I do see how we
could build stuff on top of RDDL (or maybe DDDS) that could ask the
authority directly for an answer to a questions about URI denotation in
RDF.

Received on Thursday, 8 August 2002 10:37:29 UTC