Re: Significant W3C Confusion over Namespace Meaning and Policy

Patrick Stickler wrote:

> Rather RDDL, or rather, the idea of namespace documents, should just be  
> dropped.
> Getting back a namespace document which identifies all of the versions  
> of all of
> the vocabularies, schemas, ontologies, etc. employing terms from that  
> namespace
> is useless.
> 
> How is an application to know *which* version of *which* model to
> apply in order to interpret the term in question? It can't, because
> a given namespace is not tied to a specific version of a specific
> model -- insofar as the specifications are concerned 

You're so focuses on ontologies and models and machine understanding 
that you've managed to completely miss the real point of RDDL. It has 
relatively little to do with machine understanding (though I don't think 
it's quite as useless in that arena as you do), but even if we grant 
that RDDL has no purpose for machine comprehension and processing, it 
still serves two important purposes very nicely:

1. It keeps the error logs from filling up with 404s.

2. It lets *people* learn something about the namespace, including the 
various versions of various vocabularies, schemas, ontologies, etc. 
employing terms from that namespace.

It's not all about machines. In fact, RDDL was invented primarily 
because humans were having trouble with this stuff. Machine processing 
was an afterthought.

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim

Received on Thursday, 17 February 2005 11:33:13 UTC