On 6/19/11 7:43 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
Point taken Pat but I have been in the same ring as you for many
years, but to progress the Web ---- can't we just take our hands off
the wheel, let it go where it wants. (Not that I have any influence,
and realistically you neither Pat). I'm now just back from a
sabbatical, but right now would probably be a good time to take one.
If these big companies do engage on the "microdata" front, it's great.
I'm sure it's been said before, why don't we get pornographers working
hard on their metadata on visuals, because they work for Google/Bing
whatever. The motivation right now might not be towards Tim's day one
goals of sharing some stuff between departments at CERN, but that's
irrelevant in the longer term. Getting the the Web as an
infrastructure for data seems like a significant step in human
evolution. And it's a no-brainer. But getting from where we are to
there is tricky. Honestly, I don't care. It'll happen, my remaining
lifespan or about 50 on top, there will be another, big, revolution.
Society is already so different, just with little mobile phones.
/gak I'm no going to speculate, we're heading for a major change.
Danny,
Do you agree with HTTP-range-14 finding or not?
My gripe with HTTP-range-14 is all about aesthetic matters re. language
and anecdote choices, not the core concept it attempts to articulate. If
you clearly state your gripe in similar terms there could be a chance of
yourself and Pat actually realizing that you are in agreement.
Personally, I've always assumed you clearly groked why Name and Address
disambiguation is vital re. Web's data space dimension. I am suspecting
that you are saying: we should find ways to co-exist with initiatives
(e.g. schema.org) that haven't addressed these matters, just yet etc..
Note: many are grappling with how to construct viable business models
from Linked Data, thus in some cases you will have services that look
like they don't care about Name and Address disambiguation on the
outside, courtesy of their publicly accessible resources, while in
reality they understand these matters very well and have put them you
use for a while. Remember, a URI doesn't have to be public :-) I think
the debate will ultimately be more about getting these big players to
share their more powerful URIs with the public via services and apps
from communities like this that make the opportunity costs of these big
players palpable :-)
Kingsley
Cheers,
Danny.
On 19 June 2011 06:05, Pat Hayes<[email protected]> wrote:
Really (sorry to keep raining on the parade, but) it is not as simple as this. Look, it
is indeed easy to not bother distinguishing male from female dogs. One simply talks of
dogs without mentioning gender, and there is a lot that can be said about dogs without
getting into that second topic. But confusing web pages, or documents more generally,
with the things the documents are about, now that does matter a lot more, simply because
it is virtually impossible to say *anything* about documents-or-things without
immediately being clear which of them - documents or things - one is talking about. And
there is a good reason why this particular confusion is so destructive. Unlike the
dogs-vs-bitches case, the difference between the document and its topic, the thing, is
that one is ABOUT the other. This is not simply a matter of ignoring some potentially
relevant information (the gender of the dog) because one is temporarily not concerned
with it: it is two different ways of using the very names that are the fabric of the
descriptive representations themselves. It confuses language with language use, confuses
language with meta-language. It is like saying giraffe has seven letters rather than
"giraffe" has seven letters. Maybe this does not break Web architecture, but it
certainly breaks **semantic** architecture. It completely destroys any semantic coherence
we might, in some perhaps impossibly optimistic vision of the future, manage to create
within the semantic web. So yes indeed, the Web will go on happily confusing things with
documents, partly because the Web really has no actual contact with things at all: it is
entirely constructed from documents (in a wide sense). But the SEMANTIC Web will wither
and die, or perhaps be still-born, if it cannot find some way to keep use and mention
separate and coherent. So far, http-range-14 is the only viable suggestion I have seen
for how to do this. If anyone has a better one, let us discuss it. But just blandly
assuming that it will all come out in the wash is a bad idea. It won't.
Pat
On Jun 18, 2011, at 1:51 PM, Danny Ayers wrote:
On 17 June 2011 02:46, David Booth<[email protected]> wrote:
I agree with TimBL that it is *good* to distinguish between web pages
and dogs -- and we should encourage folks to do so -- because doing so
*does* help applications that need this distinction. But the failure to
make this distinction does *not* break the web architecture any more
than a failure to distinguish between male dogs and female dogs.
Thanks David, a nice summary of the most important point IMHO.
Ok, I've been trying to rationalize the case where there is a failure
to make the distinction, but that's very much secondary to the fact
that nothing really gets broken.
Cheers,
Danny.
http://danny.ayers.name
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