John Graybeal wrote:
I think a key point of David's original post, which I would like to
emphasize, is that if I use a URL to refer to a web page, the owner is
generally either readily visible (in the URL) or discoverable (via
domain lookup). When I represent a term as a URL, it is at least known
who is serving that URL; and often the _developer_ of the term can be
derived intuitively (e.g., by dereferencing the URL in a browser).
These are positive social outcomes, and encourage further adoption of
the term.
When I represent a term as a URN or other URI that can not be
dereferenced directly in a browser, almost all of that social context
is lost. The responsible party can be found only by manually parsing
the URN, going to an obscure (to most) web page, manually looking up
the URN authority. The developer of the particular term may be
discoverable from the rest of URN -- but any semantics embedded in the
rest of the URN, if any, can only be known by finding and reading the
materials from the application of the responsible party. And the
actual metadata for the term can only be found by discovering, through
close analysis of the application or some other way, a 'magic lookup
URL' so a browser can look up the URN and provide additional
information about it.
It isn't that these problems can't be solved; eventually global URI
resolution will probably be available with browsers thanks to tricky
and consensual underlying technologies. But the initial
specifications as rolled out provided no standard way to solve them,
so until the marketplace converges, the social conventions available
with URLs are not supported.
I would quibble with some of the details of David's original argument.
Someone other than Company X can have the companyx.nnn domain, for
example. And semantic systems could use 'term rank' methods to derive
the most important URI for a term like 'microsoft', thereby achieving
at least one of Google's neat tricks in the semantic realm. But
overall, the adoption of semantic and other URI-based technologies in
the human world will inevitably lag that of http URLs, until the
technologies are so fully developed that all these 'weaknesses'
(strengths in other respects, of course) are fully addressed.
Well put, John! Thank you--that's what I meant to say. You and I are on
the same page.
David
