Re: Editor's Draft of ISSUE-57 URI Usage Primer

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 11:48 AM, Alan Ruttenberg
<alanruttenberg@gmail.com> wrote:

>> I like the concept of "landing page" as being a page which "describes" something else.
>
> Expect that this is an incorrect characterization. First, "landing
> page" is a piece of language, not a concept.

Are you saying you don't understand how the 'URIs in data' document is
using the term "landing page", or that you disagree with the choice of
term?  They are two different questions.  We need a word for where you
"land" when you GET, and "landing page" was the best we could come up
with.  Inevitably the choice will be a term of art, no matter what
term is chosen. There have been many other attempts at terminology,
and none has stuck as well as this one.

I guess we could call them "bunnies" or "entities of type 42" if you
find conflicting connotations of "landing page" too strong. Personally
I like "landing page".

The ontology of these things is quite tangled. Our experience over the
past ten years is that articulating what they are is a lost cause. A
sensible ontologist like you would just stay as far away from them as
they can, and stick to hash and 303 URIs (or else use a sensible
private interpretation and give up on interoperability). Fortunately
success here does not rely on ontology, it depends only on empiricism
- what experiments do you do to test whether a set of JSON records, or
an RDF graph, is consistent with reality. Explaining that is the
objective I think we should aim for in crafting this document. I think
that is doable.

Jonathan

Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2012 16:47:55 UTC