[topicmapmail] PSIs - alternatives

[Steve Pepper]

* Jack Park
|
| RDF workers in the health care field have started a wiki
| about dereferencing URIs.
| http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLS/WebClosureSocialConvention
|
| It seems that we are not the only folks orbiting in this
| space of ideas regarding getting meanings out of URIs.

Yes and no. They do indeed wish to be able to dereference identifiers, but
for quite different reasons.

The purpose of the subject indicators (or resource descriptors) in the
Published Subjects (or PRI) paradigm is to provide *humans* with just enough
information to decide whether or not the PSI/PRI suits their needs, and they
should therefore contain the minimum number of assertions necessary to
achieve that purpose. The more assertions, the greater the likelihood that
people will avoid using the PSI because they disagree with the opinions that
the minter of the PSI holds about the subject in question. This defeats the
whole purpose of PSIs, which is to establish agreement concerning the
*identity* of subjects, not agreement concerning *opinions* about those
subjects.

The RDF folks you refer to are talking about providing "additional
[machine-readable] RDF content" [1] - in other words, assertions about the
subject. This inevitably involves a degree of "ontological commitment" over
and above agreement concerning the identity of the subject.

I'm not saying they are wrong to want to do this; merely that it's a
different goal than the one we have with PSIs.

--
Steve Pepper, Ontopian


[1] "The motivation is the existence of well established vocabulary terms
that suggest to an RDF client when to attempt to dereference a URI for
additional RDF content."