- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 13:10:03 -0700
- To: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>
- Cc: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>, "'Michael Mealling'" <michael@neonym.net>, www-tag@w3.org
Sandro Hawke wrote:
> All I'm saying is: when it comes to building the Semantic Web, it
> seems useful to know or be able to find out easily which URIs denote
> response points. For the others it's nice to be able to find an
> associated response point which is in some sense authoritative.
Whether or not a URI identifies a response point is something that
varies temporally and perhaps along other axes; the basic Web
architecture just has to be able to deal with this fact, so we can't
write that distinction into webarch. Put another way, the Web has no
way to know whether or not a URI is intended to be a response point; all
it can do is (assuming the scheme defines retrieval protocols) is ask
for a representation and get one (or not).
I'm hoping that one of the things the SW will do will publish a set of
well-known and broadly-agreed-upon classes of URIs that would in fact be
useful to lots of applications. For example "Reliably usable as a
response point".
> There are many useful categories of URIs, just as there are many
> useful categories of almost anything.
Yes, and one of the reasons we need the SW is we don't have a good way
to talk about them. At the level of the basic Web Architecture, there
is only one kind of URI.
--
Cheers, Tim Bray
(ongoing fragmented essay: http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/)
Received on Thursday, 17 July 2003 16:10:04 UTC