Re: Domain of :key

On Sun 2013-Mar-31, at 20:33, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
 wrote:

> No, it is a thing that does stuff. There is no problem with calling your web server an agent.  Browsers are called user agents, presumably because there are server agents. There is a whole field of programming called agent oriented programming.

>> Similarly, I have applications which have their own client certificates for communicating with servers: these are issued specifically to the application so that it can authenticate autonomously with an identity which is deliberately distinct from any human involved in its development and operation. Again, describing a webapp as a foaf:Agent strikes me as dubious stretching of the term 'agent', there (compared to, say, an application which is operating under the "direction" of an operator).
>
> No there is no problem with that. foaf:Agent is more general that human agents, and so you can give a webid to a software
> agent and relate it via the cert:key to a public key. No problem.

If you ascribe foaf:Agent to everything which has some property which means it may at some point fall within the definition given, then you end up applying foaf:Agent to pretty much everything…

This is the distinction, I guess, between 'is defined as an agent' and 'has the properties of an agent' — and I suppose why X.509/LDAP has a distinction between 'structural' and 'auxiliary' classes (the former being defining qualities, the latter describing facets).

What about, say, a piece of digital media? There are situations where encoded media has its own keys conforming otherwise to the ontology, and it's a bit of a stretch to say that *it* is an agent.

Flipping this around the other way, why _should_ the domain be restricted to foaf:Agent? What practical problems does it cause? (Noting that this isn't necessarily modifying the definition of a WebID, just that anything can have a key or even a certificate associated with it).

M.

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Received on Sunday, 31 March 2013 23:55:58 UTC