URI Ethics
The debate over the range of HTTP rages on. The core of the debate is whether or not it is OK for an http: identifier to identifysomething other than hypermedia, like acar. The only answer is “no”.
URIs are the words of the Internet. Sometimes words are ambiguous, but words are normally expected to mean things. That is what they are for. URIs (and URLs) identify things. That is what they were created for, and what they are used for. It is the only purpose of URIs. When we use words in communication, we always try to use the most appropriate words and avoid words which could easily be interpreted to mean something different than we wish to convey. By the same token, when we attempt to convey meaning on the semantic web, our systems will have to do their best to choose the right URIs.
I find it alarming that people are still arguing in favor of using http: identifiers to identify automobiles. I might write an essay later about the massive logical flaws and wack thinking of the people arguing to abuse URIs, but it’s only depressing that something so fundamental could require explaining. The thing that is alarming is that the stakes are so high. The issue of URIs is foundational to the entire web, and especially the semantic web. It is the issue upon which everything else rests.
Dag Hammarskjoldsums it up: “Respect for the word is the first commandment in the discipline by which a man can be educated to maturity - intellectual, emotional, and moral. Respect for the word - to employ it with scrupulous care and an incorruptible heartfelt love of truth - is essential if there is to be any growth in a society or in the human race. To misuse the word is to show contempt for man. It undermines the bridges and poisons the wells. It causes man to regress down the long path of his evolution.”
Hammarskjold in this quote explains that human evolution is critically dependent on our use of words,and that misuse of words harms the human race. He’s not engaged in speculation about whether or not word mean things — it really doesn’t matter if the meanings of wordsare sometimes ambiguous, nor does it matter that word meanings are a matter of convention. He’s talking about how we use words. His conclusions are self-evident, regardless of whether you prefer Rand or Chomsky. The other thing to notice is that he calls this the first commandment. This also is self-evident. Ability to communicate thoughts reliably to other humans is the most basic prerequisite of forming a civil society.
Everything that Hammarskjold says about words applies doubly to URIs. The Internet is nothing more than a tool through which humans communicate with one another. The radio and telephone have mostly eliminated geography as a significantimpediment to human communication, and the WWW is slowly eliminating memory as a significant impediment.But we are still using words to communicate — these revolutions don’t absolve us from our responsibilities to respect the word. In fact, as we gain more power to communicate, abuse of words has power to spread the poison much wider than ever before.
Search engines like Google demonstrate that the next wave of communications evolution is to eliminate “discoverability” as an impediment to human communications. This is the “semantic web” — if 10,000 different people have made public comments about my product, I don’t want to have to visit 10,000 different web sites to find them all. And if I want to make a comment about somebody else’s product, I want to be able to just post the comment to the “cloud” with full confidence that they will be able to get it (if they desire), and without having to worry about whether I am posting to the right web site or not. Unfortunately, it’s not likely that Google is going to be able to collect product reviews about my product unless everyone posting reviews remembers to add some information saying “this is a product review”, and “it is about product X”. Humans attempting to aggregate all of the product reviews by hand would probably have no trouble dealing with ambiguities, misspellings, and so on. But the goal of the semantic web is to eliminate the need for humans to act as middlemen in these sorts of loosely-coupled conversations, and machines aren’t as good as humans at dealing with ambiguity (let alone capricious misuse) in language. Therefore, respect for the word (which is a URI on the Internet)is of paramount importance to the semantic web.
The semantic web will not work if people are encouraged to gratuitously misuse URIs. The semantic web will not work if URI meaning is dependent on things likeinference based on dereferencing (HTTP GET — this would be the same as if, in conversation, you needed to look up every word in the dictionary, and the dictionary changed by the hour). The potential benefits to human society which could result in us eliminating discoverability as a communications impediment are huge. But it is frightening that we have people who can so dazzle and mystify themselves with their own sophistry that they fail to notice themselves trampling on the foundation of something so promising.