Stymied on namespaceDocument-8

Although the thread that this message[1] started was interesting, and
even though I've thought about the issue a fair bit in the intervening
months, I find that I am still unable to make progress on
namespaceDocument-8.

I don't believe that further time spent thinking about the issue will
help, at least not without some new insights.

The remaining sticking point, I think, is the observation that a
statement of this form:

  <http://docbook.org/xml/5.0b1/rng/docbook.rng>
     assoc:nature <http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0> .

is unnacceptable to some members of the TAG. There are a number of
grounds on which I recall hearing objection:

1. That the URIs used for "nature" vary considerably. Sometimes
they're namespace documents, sometimes they're web pages, etc. The
lack of a concise definition for the range of types of values that can
be "natures" is problematic.

2. That the URIs are not evidently matters of fact, they are simple
assertions. This could be mitigated if we replaced some of the URIs
with facts (i.e., instead of using the namespace of a vocabulary, we
could use QName of the document element of documents in that
vocabulary). But I don't think there was general agreement that that
strategy would work, even if we could find matters of fact for all of
them, which I can't.

3. Because the range is broad and the definitions aren't observable
facts, there's no precedent for inventing new values.

I have some sympathy for this last point. I have a long standing
action item with the XSL/XML Query WGs to produce a RDDL document for
the XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators namespace document. I've been
waiting for the TAG issue to be resolved partly because I imagined
that its resolution would involve inventing a few more natures and
purposes, specifically in my case, ones for the nature 'XPath
function' and the purpose 'computing a result'.

Unless something changes, I'm going to suggest that the TAG abandon
this issue as irresolvable.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2007May/0014.html

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | Everything should be made as simple as
http://nwalsh.com/            | possible, but no simpler.