- From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 22:15:34 -0500 (EST)
- To: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com
- Cc: skw@hplb.hpl.hp.com, John_Barton@hplb.hpl.hp.com ('John J. Barton'), mnot@mnot.net, xml-dist-app@w3.org
> +1, exactly! I think that's why GET can only "get" you so far in modeling > the whole world. If you've got a human to figure out details of the > contract, you can (appear to) leave a lot of it unspecified. To just tell > machines to GET and PUT/POST each others properties, with no tighter > contract than that isn't likely to work. I'd like to focus on "with no tighter contract than that". What do you mean by "contract" here exactly? From your multiplication example, you would appear to mean that you require certain behaviour of resources, exposed as new methods by those objects. Is that a fair characterization? If I did a GET on http://number.org/multiply (with "Accept: application/rdf+xml"), and it returned an RDF document which asserted that it was of class http://mathstandards.org/multiplier, which I knew about, is that enough of a contract? Or if I did a similar GET on http://mathstandards.org/multipler and found an RDF document which described what a multiplier is (not *how* it does it) in terms that I understood (and if I didn't understand them, I could keep GETing links until I did, like looking up words in a dictionary to determine the meaning of a sentence), is that enough of a contract? GET/PUT/POST/DELETE is sufficient agreement over the wire, because it comprises an application that permits extended agreement to be made within itself. This is hypertext, and the Semantic Web exists to make the extended agreement currently available to humans (because we share a lot of context with other humans), also available to machines. At the very least, as I said before, the Semantic Web and RPC are both computationally complete. If you don't buy my arguments, you might want to at least consider that TimBL's vision for the future of the Web is the Semantic Web. Web services is not something he had in mind at all. Hear what he has to say (or what he doesn't say) here, including the Q&A session at the end; http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?stream_id=616 MB -- Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. mbaker@planetfred.com http://www.markbaker.ca http://www.planetfred.com
Received on Wednesday, 6 February 2002 22:26:21 UTC