RE: Significant W3C Confusion over Namespace Meaning and Policy

I agree.  The specification is an issue because it isn't clear that 
all the namespace URI does is act as a wall.  That can be clarified so 
that there aren't any bad surprises.  On the other hand, it is a URI 
and a URI is a control in other contexts (it is a link), so innovative 
uses of it to make life easier can't be stopped.  Might as well document 
them and get some synergy among the mammals.

Don't forbid what can't be controlled.  It just dissipates energy as 
friction.  Controls emerge from contention.  Cybernetics 101.

Trimmed the reply list for all the good reasons....

len

From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
Elliotte Harold

Patrick Stickler wrote:

> 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.

Received on Thursday, 17 February 2005 16:12:47 UTC