- From: Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org>
- Date: Sun, 12 Sep 2004 09:13:16 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-tag@w3.org
I'm a lurker on this list, and find these problems of determining how a URI can be used under various circumstances to be of deep importance - though for the time being, I agree with the compromise reached earlier, that a resource is - well, anything. However, then the problem becomes to clarify what resource is at issue in sentences containing URIs. Henry Thompson and I have a proposal called Web Proper Names (WPN) that attempts to hack through some of these issues to produce a useful result - a way of telling which URIs are about things that are not web pages (things qua things minus the web), and which are about web pages qua web pages. The entire proposal is online here: http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ht/webpropernames/ We introduce the concept of a WPN to as a URI scheme for identifying web-pages in their role as being about things. While at first this seems similar to a proposal by Larry Masinter for a 'tdb' URI schema [1] web proper names provide much greater context, allow extension into the use of search engines. Expanded Web Proper Names allow the entire format to be given in some form as a http: URI as as well. The proposal is in part based on the work of Kripke and Frege as regards sense and reference (since philosophers have been trying to work on this problem of naming a thing versus a representation of a thing for a century, we should at least glance at them!). Both myself and Henry would be very interested in comments. We also approach the problem in a TAG-neutral way :) To reparse the problem: 1) a URI is a name for resource. 2) A URI may or may not enable retrieval of a representations (c.f. XML namespaces) 3) A URI can potentially be used as a name of a thing (which for this discussion is something not "on the web") in an ontology, whether or not any actual statements are made about such a thing. 4) Alternatively a URI could be used as a name for a representation about a thing, whether or not a representation is actually retrieved from it. If we are making statements (RDF or otherwise), we want to be able to make a statement about either a thing denoted by a URI or the representation denoted by a URI. Depending on the context, that may or may not be obvious. So, we need a mechanism to tell whether a URI is about a thing or a representation of a thing. One solution (explored by WPN and Larry) is a new scheme (such as wpn: or tbl:). Another, albeit more limited solution, is another format for "things" that uses the current http URI scheme (Expanded Web Proper Names). The fact of the matter, and the problem, is that URIs are "universal", they can be used for *lots* of things, from naming namespaces and ontologies to retrieving webpages. Thus keeping the definition vague is actually rather useful. We think there are many cases where allowing the intent of a URI in this regard to be determined by inspection is at least useful, at best necessary, hence the utility of Web Proper Names, i.e. a URI scheme for URIs which unequivocally denote things in the real world, not web-retrievable representations. If we are determined to stick to a http URI scheme, we should at least have canonical representations for "things" to resolve ambiguity. Hope this helps, Harry [1] http://larry.masinter.net/duri.html P.S: I'm still working on the XSL and Schemas for WPN, but should be done with in a week or so at www.webpropernames.org.
Received on Sunday, 12 September 2004 13:18:12 UTC