Kashori - Semantics for Social Agents

Semantics for Agents

Thursday, May 12, 2005

Cars are Information Resources - Documents are Objects Too. 

The WWW Tag group has been debating an issue named httpRange-14 for close to 3 years. I think it can resolve it by abandoning the dichotomy between Information Resources and non-Information Resources, a distinction that is personal, historical, and context dependent. Here is why.

One of the premises for this dichotomy was that while you could clearly put a document about a car on the web you couldn't put the car itself on the web. This is no longer true. The distinction is rapidly fading away between those things that can be given an HTTP interface and those things that cannot.

Google has recently announced Google Ride Finder, a search service that allows a browser user to use HTTP to find the location of taxi cabs and request rides. Soon automobiles will have http servers in them that serve data (as documents) about the car. I assert that, when cars have wireless http servers in them, cars will be on the web too, in the same sense that the U.S. Constitution, the Mona Lisa, and the novel Moby Dick by Herman Melvile are now on the web.

On the other hand, the United States Constitution is actually a physical document as well as an abstract one. It sits housed in case at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Other famous information resources like the Mona Lisa are clearly objects. To use another famous example, the original manuscript for Moby Dick is an object as well. And all of these are objects in the same way a car is, with weight, location, and other hard physical properties. And yet they are on the web. Or at least representations of them are.

The boundry between matter and information is fuzzy and indistinct. DNA is information but it is a molecule as well. Ink is a chemical liquid that dries on paper but can also be text. In the end, I think it will turn out the distiction between object-documents like those about cars and document-objects like the Declaration of Independence or the Mona Lisa will turn out to be personal and context dependent. The real distinction is between those things that now have an HTTP interface, and those that do not yet have one.

So to identify any of these, give them different URLs and distiguish them with properties. The original manuscript for Moby Dick will have properties pertianing to 19th century manuscripts, the book Moby Dick will have other properties such as publication date, the fictional white whale named Moby Dick will have properties like weight and species.

There is also a concern with identifying web pages themselves. This is the similar to the difference between the character string "Moby Dick" and the novel Moby Dick. It is the difference between use and mention. You may mention the string "Moby Dick" or use Moby Dick to refer the novel. The great utility of web pages is their use to represent the Constitution, the Mona Lisa, or the novel Moby Dick. Their mention, as web pages, should be given another name like we do with words, say by enclosing it with quotes, http://example.com/QuoteMobyDickUnQuote.

# posted by John Black @ 7:31 PM
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"We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name. Do you not understand?" "I do." "In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables." "Of course." "But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table." "Yes." "And are we not also in the habit of saying that the craftsman who produces either of them fixes his eyes on the idea or form, and so makes in the one case the couches and in the other the tables that we use, and similarly of other things? For surely no craftsman makes the idea itself. How could he?" "By no means."
Plato, Republic X, page 596a

"This convention is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition, that something is to be performed on the other part. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less derived from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and. by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And it is only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually established by human conventions without any promise. ..." - A Treatise of Human Nature, Chapter 74 by David Hume

"...Semeiotike, or the doctrine of signs; the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Logike, logic: the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For, since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: and these are ideas. And because the scene of ideas that makes one man's thoughts cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another, nor laid up anywhere but in the memory, a no very sure repository: therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of, are articulate sounds. The consideration, then, of ideas and words as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no despicable part of their contemplation who would take a view of human knowledge in the whole extent of it. And perhaps if they were distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with." - AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING by John Locke 1690