- From: David Megginson <david@megginson.com>
- Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 11:15:49 -0500
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org, xmlschema-dev@w3.org
Dan Connolly writes: > > Clearly, it hasn't worked > > Huh? I use it all the time; so do lots of other folks. It works > fine. What problem(s) are you referring to? The lack of any critical mass of implementation -- there's a lot of software, but very little data outside a few dedicated research projects and the popular but very narrowly-specialized cases of RPMFind (run by a W3C staffer in any event) and RSS (note, by the way, how little code is shared in software for those two projects). XML in general on the Web has also failed by the same measure, though (like Java) it has had great success behind the scenes on the server side. > As if Tim B-L is the only one who believes that the Web > should work like it does? No, but he's the one with the big club (the ability to veto any W3C spec he disagrees with), so he matters an awful lot more than the rest of us. Lots of people expect that > the best place to find info about > http://example.org/foo#bar > is, in fact, http://example.org/foo#bar Who owns the thing being discussed? Let's say that I want to publish information about the Battle of Jutland. If I use the identifier http://www.megginson.com/battles.rdf#jutland I've left anyone else who wants to describe the same battle with a choice between two miserable alternatives: 1. use the same identifier, and eternally privilege my information over anyone else's; or 2. use a different identifier, and lose any easy possibility of collating the information. Yech. > > no one's statements > > should be privileged, > > Why not? If you want to know what my favorite color is, > surely an answer from me is privileged over an answer > from, say, someone who hardly knows me. That's a question that can be answered only on a property-by-property basis -- you're a reasonable authority on your favorite colour, but the W3C is a better authority on whether you're in its employ, and WWW10, on whether you're a speaker. Subjective statements (Dan Connolly is/is not intelligent, good looking, interesting, a good coder, etc. etc.) rightly belong to no single authority, though we'd be likely to privilege *any* other authority over the person himself. In summary, it probably makes sense to treat http://www.danconnolly.org/about.rdf as an authority for the specific case of Dan's favorite colour, but not for many other things. Encouraging resolution of RDF resource identifier URIs is wrong for the general case. All of these problems arise even with something -- a living human being -- that has an obvious, legally-enforceable identity. Many (most?) of the things we'll want to describe in a data-based Web -- ideas, historical people/places/things, etc. -- don't even have that. > Er... I'm looking at piles of robust, interoperable software > that uses URIs in this fashion. > http://www.w3.org/RDF/#developers > http://www.w3.org/XML/Schema#Tools I've written a couple of big chunks of it, and I'm afraid it's neither robust nor interoperable, though I've done my best. The inability to round-trip a Namespace URI is the killer. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@megginson.com http://www.megginson.com/
Received on Monday, 12 February 2001 11:18:04 UTC