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A Pragmatic Theory of Reference for the Web

Meanwhile, the Web Architecture document[15] says, “By design a URI identifies one resource.” Which does http:// www.imdb.com/title/tt0091605/ identify, then, the movie, or the page about the movie? The pragmatic answer is: it doesn’t matter that much, provided the community of people making the links and serving the information “agree (to a reasonable extent) on a set of terms and their meanings.” Human readers are quite robust when it comes to understanding puns and ambiguously indirect references, but computers are not; in a C program, the difference between *p and **p is the difference between a useful computational result and a crash. Even for human readers, there are limits. If visiting http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000225/ with a web browser showed Christian Slater’s photo and filmography, and a writer used that address to refer, indirectly, to Sean Connery, readers would likely feel that Grice’s Maxim of Manner[13], “Avoid ambiguity”, had been violated. The design of the Web of documents we have today is the result of taking the simplest features of hypertext designs from 15 to 20 years ago, adding globally scoped Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), and relaxing link consistency constraints. The social dynamics of the Web include lots of people agreeing to just a few design constraints in order to get a significant return on their investment, whether from reading or writing or both. By analogy, the Semantic Web involves starting with simple database and logic designs and using URIs for column names and symbol terms. Which constraints need relaxing and which social norms will result in exponential growth are still open questions. Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). Distribution of these papers is limited to classroom use, and personal use by others. WWW 2006, May 23–26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland. ACM 1-59593-323-9/06/0005. The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) is chartered to “document and build consensus around principles of Web architecture”. This paper gives a pragmatic theory of reference in the form of some principles established by the W3C TAG and some personal conjectures about issues that are still open.