Re: A Dirk and Ndia story about RDF and URIs and HTTPrange14

On 4/2/12 1:42 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:
> Some notes:
>
> There are no "owners" of URIs here. Dirk and Nadia use URIs for communication.

But, using the telephone network as an example, Dirk and Nadia have 
phone numbers i.e., tel: scheme URIs. To communicate by phone they need 
a phone and a number.

Yes, neither Dirk nor Nadia own the phone number in a clear sense, but 
the is something important here. Imagine them being employees of a 
company, the have phone numbers and extensions assigned to them by the 
employer etc..  The fundamental point here is that the Web Server (which 
may be document and/or data oriented) plays a critical role re. the 
construction, shape, and form or communication facilitators such as URIs.

In the Linked Data realm we use heuristics for determining style and 
behavior of URIs.

> Maybe they're both also engaged in establishing some web content so that they can use URIs for that web content to enhance their conversation, one for the other, maybe there are many people engaged in the conversation, but that's pretty irrelevant when talking about their communication using those URIs.

Yes, the notion of formal URI declaration and definition is somewhat 
irrelevant. The communication system knows what to do with URIs. A 
Telemarketer won't stop calling you just because you declared that your 
phone number is only for personal or official calls.
>
> There is no process of "mint" here. Dirk and Nadia communicate, and they can "mint" words in natural language or in triples but doing so is outside of the scope of discussion of their communication.

URIs are minted, as per earlier comment. Dirk and Nadia don't own 
telcos. But in the case of the Web, you have a Web Server and Domain 
Names which are items that Dirk and Nadia can own, even on a personal 
level. Thus, they can mint URIs with special purposes in mind.

>
> There is no notion of "resource" and "representation" here.

There is a notion of Data. Data is a resource and its can be transmitted 
and represented using a variety of expression syntaxes and 
across-the-wire serialization formats.

>   It's an artificial division useful for talking about content negotiation and so on, but unnecessary for this story.

Dirk and Nadia need to be able to translate messages. Think: Babel Fish.
> There's no need to talk about two resources being the "same", or using "different" URIs for the "same" resource.

That's at another level of abstraction and something that happens when 
processing the network payload. Now here is where equivalence fidelity 
kicks in. In a Linked Data oriented communication, each packet is a data 
object endowed with Identity distinct from its representation. After 
receiving the payload, Dirk and Nadia do need to know if entities 
referred to in the payload are equivalent by name reference of by values 
(e.g., by processing semantics of inverseFunctional property based 
relations).

There is a new fidelity that results from the exploitation of URI 
abstraction when operating in the more fine-grained data space realm of 
the Web driven by Linked Data (aka. fine-grained hyperlink based 
structured data).
>
> There's no separation of "information resource" vs. "general resource".

The payload might be coarse (information resource) or fine-grained 
(descriptor resource). There is utility in the distinction if the right 
monikers are in use. To date, the wrong monikers have been in use and 
the conceptual signals end up being lost in the narratives that ensure.

>    Dirk and Nadia communicate using URIs.

They do, but this goes beyond the point to point aspect of 
communication. Those URIs also name entities, attributes, and attribute 
value since the fine-grained payload is an EAV graph pictorial.

> Sometimes they use URIs to talk about things which cannot be easily captured in a data representation, but ... "there is no spoon": the world is also all data.

There is no 'spoon', but you have fine grained Data (that is interpreted 
as a 'spoon') endowed with the following attributes:

1. identity/name
2. representation syntax/markup
3. across-the-wire serialization formats
4. access address.

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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