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

On Mon, 2012-04-02 at 20:35 -0700, Larry Masinter wrote:
> Identity (and especially persistent identity) on the internet is an
> unsolved problem, 

I think there may be some disagreements and/or misunderstandings about
what this effort can achieve.  These are only unsolved problems if you
set your expectations too high.  

I agree that we cannot solve the identity problem in the absolute sense
of defining an algorithm for determining the intended referent of URI
100% of the time, or even finding the right URI definition 100% of the
time.  But that is not what we should be trying to do. 

On the other hand we *can* solve the problem in the much more modest
sense of providing useful value to many applications much of the time.
*That* is what we should be trying to do -- not solving the identity
problem in the absolute sense.

> and AWWW is busted insofar as it depend on assuming that that URIs
> have owners. The definition falls apart, leaving you with nothing.

I am confused by your insistence that URIs don't have owners.  You seem
to be using the word "owner" in a different sense than the sense defined
in AWWW
http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-ownership
since by that definition, it is quite obvious that every URI *does* have
an owner.

Can you clarify what you mean by "owner", when you say that URIs don't
have owners?


-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2012 14:25:54 UTC