Subject: Re: URx Questions

From: Patrick Stickler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 17:11:37 +0200

On 2002-01-21 16:25, "ext Michael Mealling" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> By those standards, URPs may make more sense, since they are
>> explicitly defined not to resolve into anything.
>
> That _is_ one of the requirements of URNs. They were _never_ required
> to be resolvable in the first place. Many of the currently registered
> URNs will never have a resolution method because non will exist.
> So the lament that "nobody seems to really know how they're going to be
> made resolvable" is missing most of the point of URNs to begin with.
> But maybe that was our fault as well...

There is, I feel, a significant difference between might not resolve
and must not resolve. It is true that a resource denoted by a URN may
never have a digital representation instantiated at any given location,
but that doesn't make such a URN the equivalent of a URP.

Cheers,

Patrick

--

Patrick Stickler              Phone: +358 50 483 9453
Senior Research Scientist     Fax:   +358 7180 35409
Nokia Research Center         Email: [email-masked]

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From: "Daniel R. Tobias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 10:46:44 -0500

> but that doesn't make such a URN the equivalent of a URP.

But, to play "devil's advocate" for the contemporary paradigm (after
my earlier arguments in favor of a more elaborate taxonomy), "never"
is a very long time... things tend to change, sometimes in
unpredictable ways, but their names don't always change accordingly --
 look at the Los Angeles Lakers and Utah Jazz, whose team names made
more sense when they were the Minneapolis Lakers and New Orleans
Jazz.

Thus, when somebody assigns a name in a particular URI scheme to
something based on his assessment of whether or not that "something"
ever will be resolvable on the Internet, this assessment may well be
contradicted by later events, leading to a need for a kludged-up
method of resolving URIs of a form that were supposed to be defined
to be unresolvable, or contrariwise, to the continued use of URIs to
things no longer resolvable that use schemes that indicate supposedly
resolvable resources, because they've embedded themselves as
identifiers in some context where they can't easily be changed.

--
Dan
Dan's Web Tips: http://www.dantobias.com/webtips/

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From: Patrick Stickler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 18:25:05 +0200

> identifiers in some context where they can't easily be changed.

A very good point. Let me try to answer it in two halves:

1. A URI which is originally intended to denote a retrievable
   resource: if that resource later has no web-accessible
   representation or expression, that doesn't change the quality
   of that resource. The name of a person who lived does
   not suddenly become invalid once they die nor equivalent
   to the name of a fictitious person. Likewise, one may
   loose all copies of some resource, but that doesn't mean
   that the resource was abstract, or should be treated now
   as abstract, just because it is no longer retrievable.

   Do URLs then denote abstract resources when offline? ;-)

2. A URI which is originally intended to denote a non-retrievable
   resource: firstly, if the resource is abstract, or non-digital,
   then one would hardly expect it to suddently become
   retrievable in a digital context such as the web. One would
   only be able to retrieve secondary knowledge or representations
   of those non-retrievable resources, not the resources themselves.

   Taking a scifi view, if later one is able to digitize physical
   entities (beam me up, Scotty) then perhaps we have to rethink
   this, but I guess we have a little bit of time to philosophise
   around that one ;-)

The key is the inherent, intended quality of retrievability
or non-retrievability ascribed to the resource denoted by the
URI, not whether the resource is or is not retrievable at some
point in time or in some given context.

Maybe that answers your question, maybe not, but that's my stab
at it at the end of a long day...

Cheers,

Patrick

--

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From: Patrick Stickler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 13:04:06 +0200

Seems my reply only went to Daniel and not to the list...

------ Forwarded Message
From: Patrick Stickler <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 18:25:05 +0200
To: "Daniel R. Tobias" <[email-masked]>, URN
<[email-masked]>
Cc: URI <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: URx Questions

Cheers,

Patrick

--

------ End of Forwarded Message