Re: URI resolver was Re: RDDL and XML Schemas Proposed Recommendation

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 10:14 AM 25/03/01 -0500, Michael Mealling wrote:
>Jonathan Borden wrote:
>> Using RDF you can make statements about URIs that cannot be
>> disproven by resolving the URI -- indeed there is no guarentee nor even
>> intention that a URI _can_ be resolved.
>
>RDF can do this, sure. But URIs don't know or care about RDF. RDF
>is simply one of a multitude of applications that use URIs. Each
>application uses them differently. In RDF's case it uses URIs to make
>some interesting and complex statements about URIs but that doesn't
>mean that URIs then inhereit those statements. 

I think you guys are straining at gnats.  What RDF does is 
entirely appropriate, and it is a useful thing to make assertions
using URIs as hooks.  The subtleties about "resolution" are
lost on most people, which is I think just fine.

The popular notion is that a UR* corresponds to some 
thingiedoohickeywhatever out there and here's an assertion about it.  
No, it doesn't affect the thingiedoohickeywhatever of course, and 
indeed it might not be true or even relevant.  But the R in UR? 
stands for Resource, and there's a widely-held popular notion of 
what a resource is perhaps best expressed in some old W3C doc as 
"a Web-addressible unit of information or service", and this is 
plenty accurate enough to be useful.

I fail to grasp the practical implications of the points being
debated here. -Tim