Relationship between social meaning and technical mechanisms
NO!! It ought to be about *social* meaning, not *technical* conventions. There is nothing social about the http protocol specification. If it is a technical convention which influences meanings then it ought to be at least mentioned in the MT. You seem to have sneaked some formal semantics in by the back door here, please take it back out again (or make it precise). ... >What I'm trying to capture here is the idea that there are "social >conventions" which are in some way bound to technology deployments. Seems to me that that is exactly what we should NOT be saying. The whole point of this stuff, I always thought, was that the 'social' notions of asserting publicly, referring to, responsibility for lying and being libellous, making promises, etc, etc, are all *just the same* as they always have been, that the technology doesnt *change* any of that, it just provides new ways to do all that old-fashioned stuff. And that RDF is part of that whole process, and should be understood as being; just because it is 'formal' doesn't enable users to wriggle out of their normal social obligations. Now, exactly *how* RDF publication gets treated in this social way is something that is not in our purview, seems to me: we ought not to even be trying to do that, that's like declaring how words shall be used by novelists in the future, or pre-guessing what the Supreme Court is going to decide. So for example maybe things will pan out so that at some future date, a new mime type is established and a dialect of RDF defined to allow 'ironic' RDF which is different in social meaning, but not formal meaning, from current RDF. We do not want to go on record as saying anything that would prevent that happening or require the RDF specs to be re-written if it does. ... I really don't see why we even need to mention URI registration issues at all here. That seems to be someone else's business, unless we want to say that how RDF is interpreted depends in some subtle way on URI registration schemes: in which case, we should say what that way is, as clearly as possible.
See: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Dec/0278.html
See: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Dec/0260.html
Rethink text dealing with interaction between technical mechanisms and social meaning.
See: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-rdfcore-wg/2002Dec/0282.html
Some input from Dan Connolly.