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Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>
> To me, this is where it gets interesting. Part of the genius of the
> original Web was that it didn't mind bad URLs - humans were part of the
> system and could deal with the 404 Not Found messages themselves.
> Annoying, but not likely to cause especially complicated problems.
Actually a significant characteristic of the SW is that it involves
technical terms like "non-monotonic reasoning" and "open world assumption"
which is specifically intended to deal with 404 errors. In OWL there is a
running joke regarding the "Ontology not found" error and how its presence
changes how people have traditionally dealt with what had been monolithic
ontologies.
>
> In the Semantic Web, on the other hand, the URIs are under the covers,
> with no simple "GET it and tell me an answer or give me an error".
Well actually, you will tend to get lots of "answer not known" messages when
404s are encountered.
>
> The original Web was simple enough that exception handling could bubble
> out to humans and there wouldn't be a huge problem. The Semantic Web is
> both a lot more complicated and its keepers try very hard to keep humans
> far away, which seems like a seriously dangerous approach to me.
>
Well you know assembly lines are dangerous also, and although my Honda
Accord is probably not nearly as fine an automobile as a Rolls Royce, it
probably breaks down less. In any case machine automation is part of the
inexorable progress of the 21st century, for better or worse. Humans are
known to make dangerous mistakes also.
Jonathan
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