- From: Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:54:17 +0100
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Cc: ashok.malhotra@oracle.com, www-tag@w3.org
I want to sketch an approaching to rethinking this architectural space which is similar to but different from Manu's. For some background/motivation, interested parties are referred to a recent talk [1] of the same name. I think what underlies any number of suggestions about the introduction/prior existence of some _flexibility_ with respect to what URIs (with and/or without fragments) identity (e.g. the passages from 3986 and WebArch which have been quoted, Manu's proposal) is a more-or-less hidden recognition that the context of use of a URI can, or even must, be taken into account (alongside the media type of the document retriev(ed/able) from it, if a fragment is involved) when determining its referent. Purely 'linguistic' context of use may be sufficient (what kind of document does the URI occur in? What markup, if any, identifies it as a URI?) in some cases. In others, not only that, but also the nature of the agent (client application, human being, server code, . . .) that is as it were asking the question [tip-of-the-hat to Larry Masinter] may be needed. One distinction in terms of context which might prove useful is between what I'll call 'actionable' and 'referential' contexts. <a href="[URI]">...</a> in a document of some ...html... media type, as interpreted by a web browser is an actionable context for the contained URI. <[URI]> rdf:type ... in a turtle or N3 document as interpreted by an RDF processor is a referential context for the contained URI. Four examples, increasingly contentious: 1) mailto:nadia@example.com -- in an actionable context this identifies a mailbox, in a referential context it identifies a person. The context distinction is the only way I can make sense of the discussion at [2]. 2) http://www.example.org/PurchaseOrder.xsd#Items -- in an actionable context, e.g. <xi:include href="..."/> in another XML schema document being processed by an XInclude-supporting processor, it identifies an XML element, whereas in a referential context, it identifies the Complex Type Definition component named 'Items' in the schema corresponding to the named schema document. 3) http://example.org/people.html#noah -- in an actionable context this identifies an element in an (X)HTML document, in a referential context (presuming there's some appropriate RDFa in the relevant document) it identifies a person. 4) http://dbpedia.org/resource/Albert_Einstein -- in an actionable context, this identifies an RDF graph, in a referential context it identifies a person. ht [1] http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/PhilWebURIs.pdf [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#indirect-identification -- Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam]
Received on Thursday, 13 October 2011 12:54:49 UTC