URI documentation (revised)

Framework:

RDF+URI is a language. It has words (URIs) and a grammar. Some words are verbs and some are not. A sentence is a word - verb - word triple.

To find out what a URI means, look in the dictionary (using the URI documentation protocol).

Words are not meaningful in themselves; meaning resides in sentences.

When we invent a new word, we need to tell others what we mean by it, so that they can understand what we say; andwhen we encounter a new term, we need to be able to look up what it means, so that we can understand what is said using it. The mechanism by which this kind of side-communication occurs for the language of RDF and URIs is URI documentation.

URI documentation isn't just a pile of information; it is a pile of information that is supposed to tell you, at the very least, what the URI is supposed to mean when used as a word in a sentence (RDF statement). This may seem obvious, but there are many examples of "metadata" that don't answer this question, as even users of RDF are not all in the habit of thinking that explanations of this sort are necessary. But for scientific applications some amount of rigor is desirable if our efforts are not to go to waste, and terminology in the form of a URI should be at least as formal, if not more so, than terminology introduced in a scientific or technical article.

"Rigor" here is judged by the ability of others to use the URI (by consulting its documentation) in communication, either as speaker or listener (writer or reader), in the way that it's meant to be used. Understanding should be testable, in principle at least, by observing the listener's behavior.

As a shorthand and to bypass philosophical discussions, we will naively use mean and name interchangeably, and say that a URI's meaning is that it names something. This practice may not withstand close scrutiny, but it is a helpful shorthand...

Deciding what you want to express, what you should express, whether you need a new word (URI) in order to express it, and how to define the new word rigorously are all very difficult. Relative to these tasks the mechanics of publication as set out below and here are straightforward.

Deciding what is worth naming, what should be named, what one needs to name for a particular application and for purposes of interoperability, and then expressing what you mean are much harder than they sound.