Re: Annotation protocols [was: How namespace names might be used]

At 01:22 PM 12/06/00 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
>
>>Namespace names either have URI syntax or are URIs.  Whichever is the case,
>>how might we envision them being used in an ideal future?
>>
>>Level 1 idea: use the URI to retrieve the semantic resource.  
>>Level 2 idea: use the URI to start down a retrieval trail.  This is the
>>idea, which I and others have talked up, of there being some sort of
>>universal related-resource-clustering vocabulary - the word "packaging"
>>has been used ...
>
>Once you use a URI in XML, then all these questions immediately
>fall on the other side of the wall - the URI side, not the XML side.
>(Discusion on http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/uri/ in theory)

If we all believed this, there wouldn't be any debate.  Maybe I just don't
understand URIs (which TimBL probably believes even if he's too polite to
say so).  If a namespace name is in the http: space, the only semantic
it has that I know about is direct-retrieval; and I have to ask "of what?"
I've made some proposals as to what that might be.

Is the contention that if we say "these things are URIs" and then we
tell the world (specifically the W3C/IETF URI-folk) "Please, we want 
a way to move from a single URI to a complex network of different types 
of related semantic resources" then we've outsourced the problem and we
can go home?

OK, that's a plausible strategy in the long term.  As of now, URIs can't
do that.  They might be able to if we nominated a packaging-document
format or if we designed an RDF-based query protocol (as has been discussed
recently).  It does feel a bit like rather extreme optimism for us to
say "we're going to say these things are URIs because we have confidence
that someone will step in and build the necessary infrastructure behind
URIs."  The record of progress in the UR* design space has not been,
uh, entirely untroubled.  -Tim

Received on Monday, 12 June 2000 20:13:17 UTC