Re: How namespace names might be used

> But... the more I think about the packaging idea, the more it seems
> insufficiently flexible and general.  At the end of the day, it seems
> like all the different kinds of related resources (stylesheets, type
> definitions, procedural code, schemas) ought to somehow become active,
> and respond to call-by-name.  I.e. there ought to be a way to
broadcast
> an appeal for stylesheets that can handle vocabularies named by
> http://a.b.com/ns37, or Java classes that can generate audio output
> from vocabularies named http://a.b.com/ns39; this is a many-to-many
> mapping we're talking about here, because a stylesheet resource could
> probably "know about" a wide variety of vocabularies (e.g., DocBook
> derivatives) that it's capable of handling.

If I understand you right, this seems like a query to a search engine.
In fact, people do something similar all the time at an abstract level -
they read a URI on a bus and when they type it into their browser, it
leads them to a site that sells lawn mowers. The look around that site
but before they decide what to buy they go to their favorite search
engine and ask for other places that sell similar (or even the same)
stuff.

However, *identification* of the semantics of the first site is
orthogonal to whether or not other resources provide similar semantics
or can be used in connection with the first site in ways the first site
didn't anticipate.

It really boils down to be able to find and define relationships like
equality between resources and under what conditions these relationships
are valid. As long as namespace identifiers are used as identifiers
only, I think I can see how this would work by layering. If you start to
enforce behavior onto those identifiers (like defining them in terms of
a search engine infrastructure) then the picture gets more muddy in my
world.

Henrik

Received on Saturday, 10 June 2000 19:10:09 UTC