On 6/11/11 8:20 PM, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
Look, Alan. I've wasted eight years arguing about that shit and defending httpRange-14, and I'm sick and tired of it. Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, Freebase and the New York Times are violating httpRange-14. I consider that battle lost. I recanted. I've come to embrace agnosticism and I am not planning to waste any more time discussing these issues.
Richard,
The battle isn't lost. The basic lesson is this, less talk and more walk. To date httpRange-14 has been a clump of gobbledygook to most. This is why I've always raised concerns with both the RDF and Linked Data narratives.
RDF supports seek to push it as the sole option for Linked Data which is a brutal fallacy, diabolical marketing, and the cruelest of obstructions to insert into Linked Data's momentum.
Linked Data is about a time test computing practice in the realm of "data access by reference". There are a vast number of programmers outside the W3C that understand de-reference (indirection) and address-of operations. These basic operations are utterly lost in the httpRange-14 narrative because it opted to carve out an island from the broader continent that is computer science.
Using Links as espoused by TimBL's Linked Data meme is an innovation that has its origins in fundamental "data access by reference". The difference is that we are using an old concept at InterWeb scale. The day we tweak the narrative is the day the confusion starts to dissipate. Disambiguating de-reference (indirection) and address-of operations via a HTTP messaging heuristic such that Objects are endowed with Names is a no-brainer, but only when the concept is understood. Thus, as stated in my earlier post, we have to make solutions that demonstrate the underlying power of this old concept that's now available to end-users, power-users, integrators, and developers via Links.
Let's keep on educating, but via solutions that make value palpable. -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen President& CEO OpenLink Software Web: http://www.openlinksw.com Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
