- From: John Aldridge <john.aldridge@informatix.co.uk>
- Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 13:01:39 +0100
- To: xml-uri@w3.org
At 16:30 03/06/00 -0400, Dan Brickley wrote: >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... : >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. This works fine if... (a) Only the creator of the namespace (i.e. the person with the ability to place things at the namespace URI) should be able to make descriptive statements about the namespace. (b) A single formulation of that descriptive metadata is appropriate to support all the various processing applications which the world will apply to documents using names from the namespace. I don't believe either of these. -- Cheers, John
Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 08:01:47 UTC