Re: Terms and statements (was: consensus and ownership)

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 09:52, Graham Klyne wrote:
> At 08:47 16/10/03 -0400, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> >Graham Klyne wrote:
> >>This idea of meaning being based in consensus also appears in the work by 
> >>Quine that I mentioned the other week [1].
> >>A possible difference in position would be that you talk about the 
> >>meaning of a URI, where Quine's analysis suggest that it's not the 
> >>individual terms but complete statements that have meaning.  (I think 
> >>that's a point that Pat has been trying to press, too.)

Yes, but an interesting thing about the Web is that many of the
terms refer to documents, i.e. collections of statements.

And if you know what <http://domain/doc> means, then
it gives you a pretty good handle on what <http://domain/doc#term>
means.

My thinking on this is very much in progress... there are
complications like

  - In general, URIs refer to stateful resources, not
    documents in the sense of sequence-of-characters.

    But... is there a useful idealization that hides this wrinkle?

  - how about looking at resources as agents; i.e. GET
    is sorta "tell me (or give me a form to inquire about)
    everything you know, to the extent you can in format XYZ".

    So foo#bar is what foo means by bar.

    I spend a certain amount of time swimming around the literature
    of logics of knowledge, modal logics, etc.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Friday, 17 October 2003 12:04:26 UTC