Hiya,
On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 01:10, Jonathan Rochkind <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It stands in the way of using them in the fully realized sem web vision.
Ok, I'm puzzled. How? As the SemWeb vision is all about first-order
logic over triplets, and the triplets are defined as URIs, if you can
pop something into a URI you're good to go. So how is it that SuDoc
doesn't fit into this, as you *can* chuck it in a URI? I said it was
unfriendly to the Web, not impossible.
> It does NOT stand in the way of using them in many useful ways that I can
> and want to use them _right now_.
Ah, but then go fix it.
> Ways which having a URI to refer to them
> are MUCH helped by. Whether it can resolve or not (YOU just made the point
> that a URI doesn't actually need to resolve, right? I'm still confused by
> this having it both ways -- URIs don't need to resolve, but if you're URIs
> don't resolve than you're doing it wrong. Huh?)
C'mon, it ain't *that* hard. :) URIs as identifiers is fine, having
them resolve as well is great. What's so confusing about that?
> , if you have a URI for a
> SuDoc you can use it in any infrastructure set up to accept, store, and
> relate URIs. Like an OpenURL rft_id, and, yeah, like RDF even. You can make
> statements about a SuDoc if it has a URI, whether or not it resolves,
> whether or not SuDoc itself is 'web friendly'. One step at a time.
>
> This is my frustration with semantic web stuff, making it harder to do
> things that we _could_ do right here and now, because it violates a fantasy
> of an ideal infrastructure that we may never actually have.
Huh? The people who made SuDoc didn't make it web friendly, and thus
the SemWeb stuff is harder to do because it lives on the web? (And
chucking your meta data into HTML as MF or RDF snippets ain't that
hard, it just require a minimum of knowledge)
> There are business costs, as well as technical problems, to be solved to
> create that ideal fantasy infrastructure. The business costs are _real_....
No more real than the cost currently in place. The thing is that a lot
of people see the traditional cost disappear with the advent of SemWeb
and the new costs heavily reduced.
>> Also, having a unified resolver for
>> SuDoc isn't hard, can be at a fixed URL, and use a parameter for
>> identifiers. You don't need to snoop the non-parameterized section of
>> an URI to get the ID's ;
>
> Okay, Alex, why don't you set this up for us then?
Why? I don't give a rats bottom about SuDoc, don't need it, think it's
poorly designed, and gives me nothing in life. Why should I bother?
(Unless I'm given money for it, then I'll start caring ... :)
> And commit to providing
> it persistently indefinitely? Because I don't have the resources to do that.
Who's behind SuDoc, and are they serious about their creation? That's
the people you should send your anger instead.
> And for the use cases I am confronted with, I don't _need_ it, any old URI,
> even not resolvable, will do--yes, as long as I can recognize it as a SuDoc
> and extract the bare SuDoc out of it.
So what's the problem with just making some stuff up? If you can do
your thing in a vacuum I don't fully understand your problem with the
SemWeb stuff? If you don't want it, don't use it.
> Which you say I shouldn't be doing
> (while others say that's a mis-reading of those docs to think I shouldn't be
> doing it)
No, I think this one is the subtle difference between a URL and a URI.
> but avoiding doing that would raise the costs of my software
> quite a bit, and make the feature infeasible in the first place. Business
> costs and resources _matter_.
As with anything on the Web, you work with what you got, and if you
can fix and share your fix, we all will love you for it. I seriously
don't think I understand what you're getting at here; it's been this
way since the Web popped into existance, and don't really want it to
be any other way.
>> No it's not; if you design your system RESTfully (which, indeed, HTTP
>> is) then the discovery part can be fast, cached, and using URI
>> templates embedded in HTTP responses, fully flexible and fit for your
>> purposes.
>
> These URIs are
> _external_ URIs from third parties, I have no control over whether they are
> designed RESTfully or not.
Not sure I follow this one. There are no good or bad RESTful URIs,
just URIs. REST is how your framework work with the URIs.
> In the meantime, I'll continue trying to balance functionality,
> maintainability, future expansion, and the programming and hardware
> resources available to me, same as I always do, here in the real world when
> we're building production apps, not R&D experiments
My day job is to balance functionality, maintainability, future
expansion, and the programming and hardware resources available to me,
same as I always do, here in the real world when we're building
production apps ... and I'm using Topic Maps and SemWeb technologies.
Is there something I'm doing which degrades my work to an "R&D
experiment", something I should let my customers know, that they're
not *really* using *real* products?
> where we don't have
> complete control over the entire environment we operate in. You telling me
> that everything would work great _if only_ everyone in the whole world that
> I need to inter-operate with did things the way you say they should -- does
> absolutely nothing for me.
Don't recalling saying stupid things like that, no.
> And this, again, is my frustration with many of these semantic web arguments
> I'm hearing
Instead of listening to rumours, why not jump in and build something
WemWebby to give it a serious go? Sure as hell the library world could
use an infusion of SemWeb kool-aid.
> -- describing an ideal fantasy world that doesn't exist, but
> insisting we act as if it does, even if that means putting barriers in the
> way of actually getting things done.
Sorry that *my* real world seems like such a fantasy world to you, and
by this fact alone I don't quite know how to respond. You're basically
telling me that what I do for a living is a sham, it won't work, it's
all wrong, it's harder than it needs to be, it doesn't play nice with
you and / or your tools ... and yet I've got over 30 years of software
development experience, and I've been in the SemWeb realm in parallel
to the "normal" one for over 10 of them, earning my livelihood that
way.
You tell me; how am *I* wrong? What am *I* doing wrong which you
clearly are not?
Regards,
Alex
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