Re: Can "http://danbri.org" and "http://danbri.org/" URIs represent different things?

On Friday, July 3, 2009, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
>
> On Jul 2, 2009, at 10:14 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 9:11 PM, Dan Brickley<danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
>
> On 2/7/09 22:50, Pat Hayes wrote:
>
>
> On Jul 2, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Dan Brickley<danbri@danbri.org> wrote:
>
>
> Hello TAG,
>
> Talking with some SW folk about OpenID, and whether my
> "me-the-person" URI
> could be practically usable as my OpenID, I came up with this
> corner-case:
>
> Could http://danbri.org be a URI for "me the person", and
> http://danbri.org/
> be a document about me (and also serve as my OpenID)?
>
> As I understand HTTP, any client must request something, so the
> former isn't
> directly de-referencable. The client has to decide to ask for / from
> danbri.org instead. But they're still different URIs, aren't they?
>
> Is...
>
> <Person xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1"/
> rdf:about="http://danbri.org">
> <openid>
> <Document rdf:about="http://danbri.org/"/>
> </openid>
> </Person>
>
> ...at all feasible? I guess it depends on how exactly we think about the
> "add a / to the end" step...
>
>
>
>
> From an RDF point of view the URI strings are different means that
>
>
> they can denote different things.
>
> I guess the question I have about this is: Why be so "clever"?
>
>
> I think I can answer that. Because people are. In fact, people use the
> same name for a person and the person's website and the person's name,
> etc., often without even noticing that they are doing it, and certainly
> without falling into instant incoherence or having their brains catch
> fire. But our inference engines can't handle this kind of ambiguity, at
> present. So it would be handy if a notational convention could be
> adopted that allowed the dumb machinery to keep its prissy distinctions
> distinct, while allowing human readers to be sloppy without even
> noticing that they are being sloppy. This idea is an elegant step in
> that direction, if it can be made to work.
>
> This might not be danbri's motivation, but it is why the idea appeals to
> me :-)
>
>
> That's pretty much it. I somehow feel awkward when "normal" Web folk are in
> the practice of putting URIs for their homepage and blogs into business
> cards and email sigs, while SemWeb folk put URIs "for themselves not their
> pages",
>
>
> Perhaps this is too clever too. Something on a business card is going
> to be typed into a browser window. Seems to me that it is perfectly
> reasonable to expect it is a bona fide web page.
>
>
> Seems reasonable that when typed into a browser window, you will **get to see** a webpage, yes. But if I have a name on my business card, seems to me that the obvious assumption is that this name **refers to** the person.

Sure. But the telephone number doesn't nor the address, nor the
company name. I don't see what make the URL special.

Web pages are interfaces for people. Semweb for machines. When
machines start handing out business cards to each other your argument
will perhaps be more persuasive. (to me, anyways)

-Alan

And the clever thing about this is that you can have it both ways,
without anyone noticing. Also, BTW, if this notational convention
about the trailing / can be made to work, then it provides a vastly
easier way of handling the http-range-14 issue than the current
recommended practice, one that I bet any 6-year-old could grok in a
few minutes. A great deal of the name ambiguity on the Web seems to be
this confusion of thing with web-document-about-thing, and if we could
handle all of that with this simple a convention, I'm all for it.
>
> Pat
>
>
> At this stage of the
> game, it seems to me that the proper thing is to explain on the web
> page a bit about this semweb stuff and there include a URI that
> denotes the person themselves, explaining why it's important. (if it's
> important enough to put on your business card instead of the usual
> thing, it's important enough to introduce the idea clearly on your
> home page, and probably more effective too).
>
> -Alan
>
> which are usually somewhat different and contain random different
>
> punctuation like prefixing "me-as-me" to the domain name, or "#me" to the
> end of the URI. This convention means that  - for those prepared to actually
> buy a domain name - there is essentially one thing to remember and not two,
> and that the "with / it's a doc, without it's a person" can be a re-usable,
> memorable pattern.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Saturday, 4 July 2009 00:25:13 UTC