Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Identity, Reference, and the Web (IRW2006) Workshop
Identity, Reference, and the Web (IRW2006) Workshop: "Goal and Theme:
Our goal for this workshop is to explore the nature of identification and reference on the Web, building on current work in Web Architecture, the Semantic Web and informal community-based tagging (folksonomy), as well as current practice in XML and theory in philosophy and linguistics. This workshop should bring together researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds in order to discuss and clarify these issues.
URIs are the primary mechanism for reference and identity on the Web. To be useful, a URI must provide access to information which is sufficient to enable someone or something to uniquely identify a particular thing and the thing identified might vary between contexts. There is no doubt that as mechanisms for identifying web pages the URI has been wildly successful. Currently, URIs can also be used to identify namespaces, ontologies, and almost anything. However, important questions about the interpretation,use, and meaning of URIs have been left unanswered, questions that have important ramifications for everything from search engines to philosophy. As soon as matters get complicated, there is little or no consensus on issues of identification and reference on the Web. Put simply, given a URI, how should the nature of its intended referent be known in an interoperable and preferably automatic manner?
This is not an easy question to answer: for example, the Semantic Web and folksonomies present two distinctly differing viewpoints. On the Semantic Web a URI nominally identifies a single resource, while folksonomies rely on a more informal group consensus. Notions of identity will have even larger ramifications when privacy and trust become central issues for the Web. The management of this issue impacts practical issues of data integration on the Web and versioning and evolution for languages that use URIs, such as XML.
This workshop at WWW 2006 will offer an open forum to constructively discuss and make progress on these issues."
Our goal for this workshop is to explore the nature of identification and reference on the Web, building on current work in Web Architecture, the Semantic Web and informal community-based tagging (folksonomy), as well as current practice in XML and theory in philosophy and linguistics. This workshop should bring together researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds in order to discuss and clarify these issues.
URIs are the primary mechanism for reference and identity on the Web. To be useful, a URI must provide access to information which is sufficient to enable someone or something to uniquely identify a particular thing and the thing identified might vary between contexts. There is no doubt that as mechanisms for identifying web pages the URI has been wildly successful. Currently, URIs can also be used to identify namespaces, ontologies, and almost anything. However, important questions about the interpretation,use, and meaning of URIs have been left unanswered, questions that have important ramifications for everything from search engines to philosophy. As soon as matters get complicated, there is little or no consensus on issues of identification and reference on the Web. Put simply, given a URI, how should the nature of its intended referent be known in an interoperable and preferably automatic manner?
This is not an easy question to answer: for example, the Semantic Web and folksonomies present two distinctly differing viewpoints. On the Semantic Web a URI nominally identifies a single resource, while folksonomies rely on a more informal group consensus. Notions of identity will have even larger ramifications when privacy and trust become central issues for the Web. The management of this issue impacts practical issues of data integration on the Web and versioning and evolution for languages that use URIs, such as XML.
This workshop at WWW 2006 will offer an open forum to constructively discuss and make progress on these issues."
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