- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2008 00:12:21 -0500
- To: Leo Sauermann <leo.sauermann@dfki.de>
- Cc: www-tag@w3.org, SWIG <semantic-web@w3.org>
- Message-Id: <p06230904c41fdea150c2@[192.168.1.2]>
Nice document. A few quibbles: ----------- "Given such a URI, how can we find out what it identifies? We need some way to answer this question, because otherwise it will be hard to achieve interoperability between independent information systems. " I know you probably don't want to get involved with philosophical issues, but this sentence is so wrong as to be misleading. We CANNOT POSSIBLY find out what any name identifies, other than by being explicitly handed the thing or being pointed to it (as in the pre-semantic Web). The best we can POSSIBLY do is to have a detailed enough description of the thing for our purposes; but no description can completely identify a single thing. So your second sentence above is particularly misleading: it suggests that the Web will not work unless we all do something impossible before breakfast. Moreover, getting involved with this highly debatable issue isn't needed, to motivate the subsequent content of the note. The point is not that we need to be able to discover what exactly it is that non-document URIs denote. The central point is only that, pretty much by definition, they denote something that isn't a document, which is why we need to distinguish the URI for the thing from a URI for any document/"information resource" which describes the thing. You can avoid the philosophical/semantic tar-pit of the nature of reference and how it can be determined, by sticking to this basic point in your introduction. ------------ "When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can reduce a client's performance considerable." This sentence is not grammatical English. Rewrite to: When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can considerably reduce a client's performance. or: When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can reduce a client's performance to a considerable degree. ----------- Section 4.4 , first paragraph, has a misleading rhetorical structure. It says that hash URIs can be used so that a family of URIs share a non-hash part, then observes that this approach has a downside, then presents 303 as an alternative which avoids the problem. But of course one can avoid this problem while still using hash URIs, simply by NOT having a family of URIs which share the non-hash part. You present this idea later in the section, but describe it, misleadingly, as 'combining 303 and hash'. As far as I can see, http://www.example.com/bob#this has nothing to do with 303: it is a straightforward use of a hash URI. It is also a beautifully simple and uniform way to handle the whole issue, by the way, avoiding all this 303-redirect craziness at a single elegant stroke. You ought to make more of it. ------------ Best wishes Pat Hayes -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 cell http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.flickr.com/pathayes/collections
Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2008 05:13:03 UTC