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On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Aaron Swartz wrote: > [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > > Now along come namespace URIs and we can > > 1) come up with an unbiguous ID for the thing called by many names 2) > > provide some conceptual unity to that category. You then come along and > > tell me that such category creation through naming is really not > > anything more than sugar and to really establish an identifiable > > category of things I have to turn to yet another mechanism (obscure RDF > > constructs). > > They're hardly obscure and they need not be RDF. Here's the point I'm > making: > > We're naming things, and their names can never be changed. We can choose to > give them long and informative names or simple and short ones, with the > information put off to the side. We can change the information, but we can't > change the name. > > Here's the question: Do you name your child: > Boy-Who-Lives-in-Kansas-City-and-Does-Well-In-Math-and-is-a-Member-of-the-Tr > ack-Team or Tom, and give people the other information when they ask for it? > > > I'm left with the feeling that we're creating an > > infrastructure only understandable by us geeks. > > I disagree, this is a very real-world decision we're making. I have to agree with Aaron here: there are many ways we'll want to talk about these named things, many categories they'll fall into. Shipping them to the world in simply named bundles (for which I still prefer dates) allows us room to move subsequently. While I prefer to use RDF to express subsequent categorisation of those named things, any mechanism at all for describing categories of thing (prose, HTML, software, XML in all flavours) can do the job. Anybody who has ever regretted creating a website with directories named after the original expectations for the site layout knows this problem: categories, applications and purposes change. We can anticipate this through adopting a minimalist naming policy. Those minimalist names may be associated with some principles of categorisation, but we'll they'll only be one of many ways of carving up the world. Here's an extreme example: the RSS 1.0 community last year named its notion of a channel with the URI 'http://purl.org/rss/channel'. Since then we've gotten into another silly fight about who controls the acronym 'RSS'. Lots of applications now embed that URI, and it'll cause them headaches to change. Dan