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<AOL>In this message, Tim has thoughtfully expressed just about everything
I've been trying to say in a more flip manner. Rem acu tetugisti, Tim. "Hear
Hear" and all that.</AOL>
> Joshua Allen wrote:
>
> > This is similar to the facility in RDF. If I use as subject:
> >
> > http://www.w3.org qualityIs good
> > I mean the web page
> >
> > But if I use something like
> > http://www.w3.org ownerIs _:anon1
> > _:anon1 qualityIs good
> > I am talking about the W3C
> > (the plain English for this is "The owner of http://www.w3.org has good
> > quality")
>
> Here I think we come to the nub of the issue. http://www.w3.org is a
> URI and identifies a resource. As programmers, there are a couple of
> interesting defined operations: comparing and dereferencing. The latter
> yields a representation of the resource.
>
> There is no way in the existing architecture of the Web to find out what
> the resource *is*. There is no way to tell whether you're talking about
> a time-varying bag of HTML bits, or the organization that xml-dev exists
> to bash. In fact, the Web architecture has no way to talk about (to
> quote BillC) what the meaning of "is" is.
>
> Thus, claiming that your first assertion above is talking about the web
> page is simply without basis in the Web architecture. The assertion is
> about the resource identified by the URI and (thank heavens) does not
> depend on what the resource is, for any given meaning of "is".
>
> If the working of RDF depends on an assumption that a resource *is* a
> bag of bits, then it's simply broken.
>
> Fortunately, I think the example above is *exactly* why we need RDF.
> There is absolutely zero chance that you and I are going to agree on the
> meaning of meaning, but with RDF I can, for example, build my own
> taxonomy of everything in the world and issue statements like
>
> http://www.w3.org TimsProperties:Is TimsTaxonomy:VendorConsortium
>
> and build a set of useful inferences from there. Alternately, I could
> assert
>
> http://www.w3.org TimsProperties:Is TimsTaxonomy:HypertextDocument
>
> and build on that. Not only am I saying things about meaning, I'm doing
> so in a way that loads smoothly into databases and supports all sorts of
> useful automatic processing.
>
> > This is why it is so critical that people not be encouraged to say that
> > http://www.w3.org IS the W3C. Because first, you already have a way to
> > indirectly identify the W3C, by saying "the owner of http://www.w3.org";.
> > And if you start saying that http://www.w3.org IS the W3C, things that
> > are perfectly reasonable and logical before such as "the owner of
> > http://www.w3.org"; become muddled and suspicious.
>
> I think there is no evidence to support the paragraph above. If it
> meets my needs to use that URI to denote an organization, and and I have
> RDF properties whose domain is "organizations", why can't I go ahead and
> do this? The domain of *your* "ownerIs" property may be web pages, and
> thus your assertion is logically inconsistent with my statements which
> treat the URI as representing the organization. What is the problem
> with this? Surely nobody imagines that the universe of RDF properties
> are all mutually consistent?
>
> In fact, I suspect that with a little study, you could build some RDF
> properties that link from your assertions to mine, working around the
> inconsistency. Paraphrasing into English "if w3.org has an owner (in
> Joshua's vocabulary), and if w3.org is a vendor consortium (in Tim's
> vocabulary), then we can conclude that Joshua's anonymous owner resource
> is a Vendor Consortium".
>
> But if you try to base anything on claims concerning what a resource
> *is*, you're off on the wrong foot.
>
> Hmm... this discussion should be happening on rdf-dev or www-tag,
> probably the latter. -Tim
>
>
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