Re: Some TAG review of "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web"

On Mon, 2007-09-24 at 18:05 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote:
> >On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 15:59 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote:
[...]
> 
> >It's in that sense that I think the TAG is reasonable in
> >suggesting this text for the "Cool URIs..." document:
> >
> >"On the Semantic Web, http: URIs identify not just Web documents, but 
> >also real-world objects like people and cars, and even abstract ideas 
> >and non-existing things like a mythical unicorn. We call all these 
> >things resources."
> 
> Sigh. If you can't see how unbelievably SILLY 
> this sounds to anyone outside our geeky W3C 
> world, I give up. "Resource" is an English word 
> with a definite meaning. Not everything is, in 
> fact, a resource.

Hmm... I'm inclined to consider it progress that
you're no longer arguing about identifier/name and
you've now chosen another scab to pick at. ;-)

>  If someone were to come up to 
> me and say that he had decided to call everything 
> a 'foodle', I would think him eccentric. If he 
> told me he decided to call everything a 
> 'pitchfork', I would say he was mad, because many 
> things aren't pitchforks. Guess which category 
> the above falls into.

I'm sympathetic to your point, there.

"resource" is what the IETF standardization
process produced.
( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt )

Oh... and the W3C process, for that matter.
(http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/#urisandlit )

But at the thesaurus.com level, the
distance between 'resource' and 'thing'
is substantial.

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

Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2007 01:32:42 UTC