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Re: Splitting vs. Interpreting

by Pat Hayes :: Rate this Message:

On Jun 18, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:

Sean B. Palmer wrote:
Sorry, looks like I had an old address on file for you.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sean B. Palmer <sean@...>
Date: Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 8:23 PM
Subject: Splitting vs. Interpreting
To: David Booth <dbooth@...>
Cc: www-tag@...

You write about ambiguous and specific references here:

http://dbooth.org/2007/splitting/

When I worked on EARL in 2002, we had to solve httpRange-14, and we
did it in a practical way which your splitting document reminds me of.

We might want to evaluate a tool of some kind in EARL, say the W3C
Validator. But then we didn't know whether validator.w3.org was the
tool itself or a page about the tool. That's httpRange-14 in a
nutshell, before it was “solved” with the 303 hack.

So what we did was this:

<http://validator.w3.org/> earl:tool _:Validator .

The clever bit is that the earl:tool property says: if the subject is
a Document (i.e. an IR), then the object is the Tool described by that
document; whereas if the subject is a Tool, then the object is simply
the same thing as the subject.

The solution is cleaver only because it pushes the ball to someone else. But it does not solve any problem at all. Whoever is to deploy the resource is still burdened with the impossible question: is what s/he is about to deploy is a Document or not because she needs the answer to know if s/he should 200 or 303. Or she needs
The real issue is that TAG, for whatever reason that I cannot understand, refuses to acknowledge such a simple truth: what you get from a URI is NOT what a URI denotes.

But why not? Seems to me that the absoluteness of your negative judgement here is just as wrong as the naive positive judgement. The very power of descriptive logics arises from their being topic-neutral: they can describe, their names can refer to, anything at all. And I see no reason to *exclude* 'what you get from a URI' from that universe of possible referents.

We never know what a URI denotes -- it is our purpose to share that knowledge. But the sharing is achieve from sharing what we get from the URI.

I agree the two roles are distinct, but one and the same thing might be both the shared thing and the topic of the content represented in that shared thing. And in this case, we *can* know what the URi denotes. In fact, this is how referents are attached to things in daily life, by explicit ostention. I pass you a book, and I say "read this, you will enjoy it". My referential word "this" is attached to the actual book by the causal nexus of my utterance being linked to the act of passing the actual book. What http-range-14 says is just like this, in a Web setting. If you toss a URI at me and I pass you back a 200-coded reply, I am in effect saying "This entity involved in the this transaction, here and now, is what you are asking about; it is the thing that the name you just used refers to".

Pat

*Document* is what we get from a URI but *resource* is not. I have argued this in the past as well as in the upcoming paper at IR-KR2009 (http://ir-kr.okkam.org/workshop-program/ir-kr-ijcai-09-program).

Once we understand the above distinction. The remedy is simple. We need to solve it *syntactically* by using a URI convention to denote what is we get from a URI, which I have proposed in another manuscript to ISWC 2009 (which fate I don't know).

Xiaoshu

And as you can imagine, this is extensible to interpreting ambiguous
resources in all kinds of ways. Now the TAG finding says that it's
removed a certain level of ambiguity, but there are other ambiguities
one might want to resolve when a page 303s and then still doesn't
define carefully what's at the end of it. So the EARL method is much
more practical.

You might also want to think a bit harder about statements such as
“there is no architectural need for Person and IR to be considered
disjoint”. Consider if you were using Facebook and it started
conflating people with groups and games and so on. But of course
people break the rules of the web until they matter, and since there's
no Semantic Web User Agent this rule doesn't matter.

I'm not saying that the TAG finding should be canned because you can
use the kind of interpretation properties that I've described as a way
around it. The point is rendered moot by various architectural
problems. But you ought to compare the 2002 and 2009 architectural
solutions carefully.

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