Exactly,
Things become even clearer when you add in a messenger.
A messenger carried a message about an erupting volcano, to conflate the
message and the subject of the message is to say that a messenger
carried an erupting volcano, which is nonsense.
We've long since known not to conflate the Messenger with the Message,
this is why we don't shoot the messenger, however I think this is
possibly the first time in history where we've questioned whether the
message and the subject(s) of the message were different things or not.
Best,
Nathan
Pat Hayes 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 usin
g 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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