Re: Is a namespace a resource? - was: duck

At 10:07 AM 2000-06-06 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>
>I see that.  You could say that it is like a person.  Normally a person is
>identified
>indirectly by a property such as a mailbox or a home page.
>In RDF, you can say that a person who has mailbox ora@w3.org has hair-color
>blond.
>Which is good enough.  We could do that with namespaces.

Can we, really?  That is compatible with the status quo.  If one wishes, in
RDF, to decorate a namespace with assertions, can we identify the namespace
similarly?  E.g.

"The namespace which uses <ns-attr value> in its namespace declaration in
XML instances has characteristic <assertion>."

There has been repeated assertion to the effect that RDF can't do this;
that it requires a URI to refer to.   If this is not actually true, if we
can use this sort of query to isolate the namespace instead of requiring
the unsupported infrastructure of a definition and a name, we would be
ahead on continuity+capability.

Have you considered the argument that in many cases such as XSLT, the
namespace per se is a non-entity?  That it is contrary to the XSLT
specification to use the XSLT names without the further restrictions in the
language specification?  The resource in this case is a language, the
namespace is a feature.

Al

Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2000 10:55:11 UTC