Re: Subgroup to handle semantics of HTTP etc?

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> Two question Alan asked recently (on the list and offline) were
>
> - "How can one ever show that a web site is behaving contrary to the 
> web architecture?"  and
>
> -  "How do i know what triples an RDF system is able to draw from an 
> HTTP interaction?"
>
> Both god questions.
> The answer to the first question could be to draw all the triples from 
> the HTTP transactions and the documents published, and then check for 
> OWL inconsistencies.  Which begs the second question.
I think that semantics should be drawn only from what is asserted in an 
RDF content, but we should not draw from how the RDF is obtained.  To 
draw conclusion from a network protocol, such as HTTP, essentially bound 
URI to its network protocol, which is a very bad idea.

URI is just a symbol that denotes a thing in the world.  What a URI 
denotes (or what it mean) is independent of how you get the 
information.  For instance, we can develop a human protocol by flashing 
a URI card to a person, the person can respond by saying what s/he knows 
or don't know or relay the question to someone else. HTTP, in essence, 
is just such a request/respond *protocol*.   The form of URI  is just 
such a design of that, given a URI, who we should ask the question about 
the URI first without any other knowledge about the URI. 

I do think that AWWW needs to clarify, but not to say what you can infer 
but in an opposite way.  I.e., to discourage any "inference" from how a 
protocol responds to a request.

Xiaoshu Wang

Received on Tuesday, 16 October 2007 11:44:38 UTC