Re: Terminology (was Re: article on URIs, is this material that can be used by the)

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 16:53 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote:
[...]
> >Re "in general," I wonder if you're reading a forall quantifier
> >that isn't there.
> 
> BUt it is there.

More argument by assertion. This is really no fun.

Thinking this over, I perhaps overstated my case a bit.
That reference and access are separate has always been
my position but for much of the development of webarch,
the TAG wasn't completely convinced of the possibility
of resources beyond information resources. And certainly
much ordinary web stuff deals with information resources,
and most of /TR/webarch is about information resources.

But please, Pat, if we're to make any progress,
I'd like you to take care to give supporting argument
when making a point.

The text you quoted is:

>>  "URIs are divided into schemes (ยง2.4) that
>>  define, via their scheme specification, the
>>  mechanism by which scheme-specific identifiers
>>  are associated with resources."

Surely it's clear that "identifiers" is existentially
quantified (for some identifiers...) and not universally
quantified. The string "qrfl:abc" is a URI but the
scheme qrfl: isn't registered, so there isn't a
specification that associates it with a resource.
Likewise, http://example/abc is a URI, but
if you follow your nose thru the specs, you'll
see that IANA reserves the "example" domain in such
a way that doesn't associate a resource with http://example/abc .
I own http://dm93.org/abc123 and I can say authoritatively
that I have not associated it with any resource.


And the argument by assertion continues...

> >It doesn't say "the design of the web guarantees
> >that a URI identifies one resource"; rather,
> >it's saying that the intended design of URIs
> >is that each one identifies one resource; if you
> >use them some other way, then you're not using
> >them as designed.
> 
> But you CANNOT POSSIBLY use them that way (if all 
> you have available is descriptions of 
> them,anyway, which is the usual case when using 
> referring names.) So this seems like damn silly 
> advice/design. 

Oh? It seems to me that we do use them that way,
by the millions, daily. Proper names work similarly;
by design, Pat Hayes refers to just one thing.
As you have pointed out, there are lots
of interpretations that are consistent with
all the texts I have ever read
using that name. But by convention, we
give distinct names to siblings to avoid
having Pat Hayes refer to two different
but nearby people... or we add Jr/Sr suffixes.
What "By design a URI identifies one resource"
is saying about URIs is that
not only should you not give you and your
sibling the same URI, you shouldn't
give a city and a person the same URI
the way we sometimes do with proper
names such as Lincoln.



-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Thursday, 28 June 2007 03:06:41 UTC