> I don't really want to get involved in this utterly pointless debate, but > just to clarify a couple of issues: Really Pat, Graham replied to a six month old email. If you think the discussion is pointless, why participate. www-archive isn't even a working group, just a mailing list for saving public copies of discussions.
stepping back from the point-by-point: it struck me as some analogy to the architectural differences between RPC and REST, or between pre-web hypertext and the web, that the differences are mainly seen in resilience of the distributed system to asynchronous development. RPC tries to hide the state of the remote processor and present the illusion of local consistency, while REST makes state explicit. Hypertext before the web insisted on referential integrity and consistency, while the web brought "404 not found" and the resilience that comes with allowing broken links. The semantic web equivalent, I'm thinking, is removing the assumption of trust. But I think there is problem with the word 'trust' > In many cases, I think that trust is implied by the context of use, and that > this corresponds to the "99% of the time" that I can ignore trust How much of what you read on the internet do you believe without reservation? If the answer is 99%, you're extremely gullible and in danger. If it's 50%, I think you're still in trouble. So maybe we're using 'trust' in different ways. Consider defining trust in terms of transfer of belief. Party A trusts party B to the extent that if B utters statement S and A receives S, that A's belief state changes to include S. If A trust B perfectly, then A believes everything B says. If A doesn't trust B at all, then A ignores what B says, or doesn't believe it, in any case. That is, "trust" is the factor that determines how utterances changes belief. Trust is individual, dependent on the origin (if A trusts B and C trusts B, the trust of A for B and of C for B are properties of A and C and not B), never total (no one really trusts someone else completely, people don't even trust their memory), rarely zero (usually someone's statements affect your belief). Trust might be negative (the fact that B says S leads A to believe not-S). Perhaps you have a word you'd rather use than 'trust'. For a semantic system to be world wide, it needs to function resiliently so that in the face of incorrect, false, malicious, sloppy, negligent, lazy sources. If you think you can close off ambiguity and trust and just assume them, then I think it's certain you're not building a web-scale system. Sure there are contexts where you can assume trust by the context, but those models don't scale. Larry -- http://larry.masianter.net
