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

On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, John Aldridge wrote:

> At 12:57 05/06/00 -0400, Dan Brickley wrote:
> >- the terms defined in a Web vocabulary need Web identifiers so others
> >   can make statements about them.
> 
> OK.
> 
> >- we need to know which such statements are authoritative, ie. produced
> >   by the creator of that vocabulary, not gossip, mappings etc produced
> >   elsewhere.
> >
> >URIs help with the former; connecting namespace URIs to notion of
> >authority helps with the latter.
> 
> I don't think so.  Statements don't divide neatly into the two classes 
> "authoritative" and "gossip".  There is a (potentially large) class of 
> statements made by people other than the namespace owner, but which I want 
> to regard as trustworthy for the purpose of some processing I am doing.  As 
> John Cowan suggested elsewhere, digital signatures are a more appropriate 
> mechanism (if you care that much).

Sorry, should've been more careful and varied in my example. There are of
course a vast number of ways in which statements about the vocabulary
might be categorised; 'gossip' was a cheap example. I do believe that one
important class is the class of statements made by the namespace owner,
and that digital signatures will be an essential ingredient in dealing
with this. You seem to be contrasting digital signatures here with my
claim that namespace URIs need to be coupled to the notion of an authority
w.r.t. some vocabulary. The two go hand in hand; I didn't read John
Cowan as saying that dig sig technology relieves us of the need for a way 
of figuring out which digitally signed assertions about a namespace come
from its owner.

--danbri

Received on Monday, 5 June 2000 13:43:33 UTC