Re: Are we elements or animals? (was: Use of fragment identifiers in XML)

On Thursday, October 31, 2002, at 10:19 PM, pat hayes wrote:
>>> RDF documents do not DESCRIBE fragments. They USE them.
>>
>> I have a triple:
>>
>> ex:John rdf:type <http://www.example.org/#Dog> .
>>
>> I grab http://www.example.org/, it's an RDF document that says (in 
>> part):
>>
>> <rdf:Description rdf:about="#Dog">
>>   <dc:description>a dog, an animal with four legs</dc:description>
>> </rdf:Description>
>>
>> According to the URI spec (via the links I cited), the #Dog is an XML 
>> element.
>
> Wait a minute. What are you saying here? Are you DESCRIBING that 
> syntactic thing that starts with a hash sign and has four ascii 
> characters, or are you USING it to refer to something?

Well, I'm defining it. That's a form of description, I guess.

> If the latter, what language do you take it to be in (and whose 
> semantic rules you will use to help determine what it refers to)? 
> Myself, I would use RDF, seeing as it occurs in an RDF document. In 
> which case, the URI spec is irrelevant, since the entire body of all 
> URI (and XML) specs ever written do not say anything at all about what 
> it is that fragIDs must be used to refer to. And in that case, 
> http://www.example.org/#Dog is a class (of dogs). '#Dog' is an XML 
> element.

Er, they do. That's what I just pointed out. According to the URI spec 
(and its references I cited) http://www.example.org/#Dog identifies the 
XML element (<rdf:Description rdf:about="#Dog">...</rdf:Description>). 
And according to the RDF spec that URI identifies a class. Which is it?

Perhaps I'm doing a poor job of explaining my argument; it sounds like 
I haven't gotten through.

-- 
Aaron Swartz [http://www.aaronsw.com] "Curb your consumption," he said.

Received on Friday, 1 November 2002 00:43:52 UTC