Re: The 'resource' identified by a namespace name URI should be the namespace

On Sat, 3 Jun 100, John Cowan wrote:

> Tim Berners-Lee scripsit:
> 
> > It also prevents the namespace URI being usefully dereferenced,
> > as dereferencing it will get only the namespace name, and never any other
> > information about the namespace.
> 
> Granted, but since there is no guarantee what you might get
> (an XML Schema? an RDF Schema? XLinks to various things? Human-readable
> HTML? Nothing at all?), this seems less than useful.  If you want
> to know things about a namespace, discover some RDF that tells
> you about it.

I think 'less than useful' is a little unfair here, though RDF would be
one of my favourite things to find when dereferencing...

There are all sorts of things I'd be happy to find when I dereference (aka
ask the Web about) the URI of some namespace. Sometimes HTML would be just
fine. Othertimes an MP3 might suit, or RDF, or DTD or XML Schema. Language
and content negotiation might get me different views of the namespace in
different contexts; access control constraints, micropayments etc might
also control what I get to see (eg. consider a huge thesaurus with a very
natural representation as an RDF graph - these things cost money and come
with usage constraints). All this I see as very useful, if a little
chaotic. The thing that hangs together this (typically
weblike) heterogeneity is that whatever we find when we dereference 
some namespace is authoritative. Whether I find HTML, MP3, a public key
(hmmm...) or XML/RDF when I dereference a namespace URI, I
should be able to treat that data as coming from the owner/manager of that
Web vocabulary, and therefore something that can tell me something of the
meaning of that vocabulary. The usefulness comes from the notion of an
authoritative source of information about the namespace. Finding RDF there
might be nice but then there's still a vast range of things you might find
out about when reading the RDF, so we're still faced with heterogeneity
(albeit in a more machine-friendly form).

--d

Received on Saturday, 3 June 2000 16:30:55 UTC