- From: Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 20:16:21 +0100
- To: www-tag@w3.org
One challenge in permathread-based discussions like this is to try to get beyond the brute facts of disagreement to the _reasons_ for the disagreement, particularly when the infrastructure of terminology and technology background is as complex as it is in this case. So wrt the second of my proposed dimensions [1], Differentiation, that there is disagreement is clear: some parties to this discussion (want to) use ordinary http: URIs as names for concepts, abstractions, properties, etc., i.e. things which are not information resources, and other parties think this is a bad idea, that ordinary http: URIs should be reserved for things you can retrieve. Fine, we all knew that. Now, the hard part -- _why_ does this disagreement arise? What have we got so far in this regard: Dan Connolly says [2] "Folks that use hashless [ordinary http:] URIs for things other than information resources are making things more difficult either for themselves or for others." OK -- why/how does this make things more difficult. . .? Harry Halpin says [3] "The Semantic Web makes as its central claim that a URI is a global identifier that can be shared across various boundaries. It is as yet unclear when mixing the SemWeb and the OFWeb exactly how to maintain that notion of identity." OK -- why do we need or want to maintain that notion of identity across the SemWeb/OFWeb boundary? What potential damage is there for one or the other? >From the other position, Roy Fielding says [4] "There is no way that a system can determine whether a user has supplied a URI for the purpose of direct, ontologically unambiguous identification of a resource, or of simple indirect identification via whatever URI seems most useful at the time. That is a problem of reference that will not be solved by changing the syntax of the identifiers." OK -- _why_ won't "[Signalling by e.g.] changing the syntax of the identifiers [solve the problem]"? I think Roy Fielding's other contribution [5] is intended to provide argumentation wrt _why_ internal Signalling can't work, but I haven't understood it yet . . . ht [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Apr/0086.html [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Apr/0094.html [3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Apr/0097.html [4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005May/0002.html [5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005May/thread.html -- Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh Half-time member of W3C Team 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail really from me _always_ has this .sig -- mail without it is forged spam]
Received on Tuesday, 3 May 2005 19:16:30 UTC