- From: Bullard, Claude L \(Len\) <len.bullard@intergraph.com>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:15:14 -0500
- To: "Paul Prescod" <paul@prescod.net>, "Pat Hayes" <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: "Harry Halpin" <hhalpin@ibiblio.org>, <www-tag@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <7411F30464DC9C479FB14CFD348D71D976477E@US-MAIL.ingrnet.com>
It could be better to stop using the term 'self-describing' because it is anthropomorphic for one and misleading. What you are saying is that it is documented and those documents are cited by the reference. Too much effort is invested in inventing new ways to say "bibliographic". Otherwise, one conventionally distinguishes labels from names. A name conventionally has a referent. A label might not. Yet Pat Hayes' point is well-taken and historically well-debated. The claim that a URI by best practice dereferences to an informative resource is a best practice of the System: The WWW. Best practices within a closed system of definitions (the web architecture is closed to itself) don't have to correspond to other systems such as a wider scope of linguistics. So given what we know about the implementations of the system which if they don't define it do circumscribe it by practice, a URI is always dereferenceable and it is a good idea to put a document of some sort at the other end even if it is just an error message because in practice **ANYTIME A BROWSER SEES A STRING WITH THAT HTTP SYNTAX IT TURNS IT INTO A CLICKABLE HYPERLINK** That is all there is to it. The RDF and XML use of URIs are convenient reapplications of the same object that weaken the syntax by claiming it for a different operation than was intended originally. There is an inverse relationship of objective meaning and subjective views as those views increase in number. Scope vs reach: the more operations subsumed by a type, the fewer users. len ________________________________ From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Paul Prescod Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 9:28 PM To: Pat Hayes Cc: Harry Halpin; www-tag@w3.org Subject: Re: CURIEs: A proposal Wouldn't you say that if "you" (in the human or machine sense) create a URI to name somethign then you must know SOMETHING about what you were trying to name. If the thing you are naming is "HTML" then you know that "HTML" stands for "Hypertext Markup Language". If the thing you are naming is a product, then perhaps you know the MSRP. On 6/27/06, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote: What they mean is determined by the totality of assertions that are made using them, and there is no way to access all of that by any kind of dereferencing. The idea that a single URI can locate an 'authoritative' or 'defining' piece of (say) OWL or RDF which is the single best source for what the URI means, is unsupported by any of the SW specs, false in many widely deployed cases (FOAF, Dublin Core), at odds with the open nature of the Web, and IMO harmful. The referent need not be authoritative or defining (though it often might be). It is enough that it be informative. Im sure it can often help, but a problem arises when someone insists that there *must* be something there, because there are going to be many cases where it is hard to impossible to provide anything useful, so what will be provided will in fact not be useful, but providing it will nevertheless absorb a lot of effort, the cost of which is a brake on development and deployment. This is the heart of the argument. What examples do you have? I could understand the argument that it is sometimes hard to provide anything at all (because providing anything at all requires a web server). But why would it be hard to provide something meanginful? Why did you create a name for something about which you know NOTHING? >It helps to make the Web be "self-describing", although the notion of >"self-describing" is something I think is another notion that could >really use some inspection. I'd sure like know what it means, myself :-) Can you elaborate? Self describing means that a reader can start by looking at some data and follow links backwards to the specifications that define the intended meaning of the data. With raw XML, the tags are "links" to English word meanings which are much more helpful than bit patterns. With (for example) HTTP-identified namespaces you have actual links to resources that might describe the meanings of the words in a human or machine-processable language. In short, a self-describing message or document points from the message towards the spec whereas most messages or documents require you to find the message or document using some out-of-band mechanism. "This file starts with the characters MZ. I wonder what file type this is?" Paul Prescod
Received on Wednesday, 28 June 2006 13:15:34 UTC