Re: Fwd: Splitting vs. Interpreting

Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> Sorry, looks like I had an old address on file for you.
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@miscoranda.com>
> Date: Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 8:23 PM
> Subject: Splitting vs. Interpreting
> To: David Booth <dbooth@hp.com>
> Cc: www-tag@w3.org
>
> You write about ambiguous and specific references here:
>
> http://dbooth.org/2007/splitting/
>
> When I worked on EARL in 2002, we had to solve httpRange-14, and we
> did it in a practical way which your splitting document reminds me of.
>
> We might want to evaluate a tool of some kind in EARL, say the W3C
> Validator. But then we didn't know whether validator.w3.org was the
> tool itself or a page about the tool. That's httpRange-14 in a
> nutshell, before it was “solved” with the 303 hack.
>
> So what we did was this:
>
> <http://validator.w3.org/> earl:tool _:Validator .
>
> The clever bit is that the earl:tool property says: if the subject is
> a Document (i.e. an IR), then the object is the Tool described by that
> document; whereas if the subject is a Tool, then the object is simply
> the same thing as the subject.
>   
The solution is cleaver only because it pushes the ball to someone 
else.  But it does not solve any problem at all.  Whoever is to deploy 
the resource is still burdened with the impossible question: is what 
s/he is about to deploy is a Document or not because she needs the 
answer to know if s/he should 200 or 303.  Or she needs  

The real issue is that TAG, for whatever reason that I cannot 
understand, refuses to acknowledge such a simple truth:  what you get 
from a URI is NOT what a URI denotes.

We never know what a URI denotes -- it is our purpose to share that 
knowledge.  But the sharing is achieve from sharing what we get from the 
URI.

*Document* is what we get from a URI but *resource* is not.  I have 
argued this in the past as well as in the upcoming paper at IR-KR2009 
(http://ir-kr.okkam.org/workshop-program/ir-kr-ijcai-09-program).

Once we understand the above distinction.  The remedy is simple.  We 
need to solve it *syntactically* by using a URI convention to denote 
what is we get from a URI, which I have proposed in another  manuscript 
to ISWC 2009 (which fate I don't know).

Xiaoshu

> And as you can imagine, this is extensible to interpreting ambiguous
> resources in all kinds of ways. Now the TAG finding says that it's
> removed a certain level of ambiguity, but there are other ambiguities
> one might want to resolve when a page 303s and then still doesn't
> define carefully what's at the end of it. So the EARL method is much
> more practical.
>
> You might also want to think a bit harder about statements such as
> “there is no architectural need for Person and IR to be considered
> disjoint”. Consider if you were using Facebook and it started
> conflating people with groups and games and so on. But of course
> people break the rules of the web until they matter, and since there's
> no Semantic Web User Agent this rule doesn't matter.
>
> I'm not saying that the TAG finding should be canned because you can
> use the kind of interpretation properties that I've described as a way
> around it. The point is rendered moot by various architectural
> problems. But you ought to compare the 2002 and 2009 architectural
> solutions carefully.
>
>

Received on Thursday, 18 June 2009 14:37:29 UTC