Matters

From: Harry Halpin
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2004 10:16 PM
To: Miles, AJ (Alistair)

Alistair,
Nice point about indirection. Generally, I think that's a good
idea to keep URIs for web-pages and concepts distinct. You could also
solve the problem via having a new URI scheme such as Larry Masinter
and we have suggested, like a wpn:// (Web Proper Name) or tdb:// (Thing
Denoted By) URI. Larry's draft for tdb:// is:
http://larry.masinter.net/duri.html.
The latest (but not final!) draft of Web Proper Names paper, by myself
and Henry S. Thompson, that deals with this identity crisis in an
extended manner is at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/webpropernames/paper/
with the older version and RDDL, RDF, RDDL->RDF XSLT, and so on at:
http://www.webpropernames.org

Also, I don't think your "indirection" proposal is at all
conflicting with the idea of using Expanded Web Proper Name RDDL formats
as a type of representation to be returned by a "concept" or thing as I
prefer to call it - and this doesn't require a new URI scheme. The key
advantage of the WPN idea is that this document form can also be *interoperable*,
something which has proven to be a disaster for traditional AI systems
that deal with ontologies of concepts. It basically gets interoperability
by collecting a group of "approved" resources that are *also* about the
thing that the RDDL denotes, and search terms used to get at those
resouorces. Then, given two WPN RDDLs, one can compare how many resources
they have in common as a way to judge if the two things denoted are the
same, or alike.
--harry

On Sun, 14 Nov 2004, Miles, AJ (Alistair) wrote:

>
> Sorry, reposting this with a more sensible title - a discussion about
> working around the 'identity crisis' for http uris:
>
> http://esw.w3.org/topic/SkosDev/IdentityCrisis
>
> Would very much like to know what folks think of this. Have I just managed
> to redescribe some emerging consensus, have I misunderstood anything, should
> I go away and read more?
>
> I wanted to say also that I am acutely aware that alot of people have spent
> a lot more time thinking and writing about this than I have. I'm really
> just trying to understand this problem space, and get to a place were I can
> effectively explain the issue (and the options) to other people.
>
> Responding to Patrick:
> 'If you have a URI that identifies a concept, and dereferencing that URI in
> a browser results in some web page displayed in that browser, that does not
> mean that the URI has been used to identify two things, the concept and
> the web page (document).'
>
> I think that puts very concisely the fundamental point I was trying to make.
> I probably didn't need to say any more than this.
>
> Responding to Daniel:
> 'A good solution, but I still prefer the notion of using XSLT to
> transform the RDF/XML definition of a concept into a human friendly
> HTML page about it.'
>
> I agree that, as a matter of good practise, any alternate content-type
> representations of the same concept need to be synchronised. One way of
> achieving this would be to use an RDF/XML description as the reference
> point, and using XSLT to generate an HTML representation.
>
> Yours,
>
> Alistair.
>
> ---
> Alistair Miles

Harry Halpin