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

On Mon, Jun 05, 2000 at 01:01:39PM +0100, John Aldridge wrote:
> 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.

That creator is the only one allowed to make authoritative assertions.
I can make assertions about anything I want. It doesn't mean anyone
listens to me....


> (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.

You don't need that. You use content negotiation in all of its forms to
evolve the expresability over time. The metadata used to describe
a namespace can have many representations. Whoever is doing the
resolution is given the freedom to request which representation they need
for their particualar application...

-MM

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Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 10:45:35 UTC