I was reminded of the title quote when I read Richard Wallis’s: A Fundamental Linked Data Debate.
Contrary to Richard’s imaginings, the vast majority of people on and off the Web are not waiting for the debates on the W3C’s Technical Architecture (TAG) or Linked Open Data (public-lod) mailing lists to be resolved.
Why?
They had identifiers for subjects long before the WWW, Semantic Web, Linked Data or whatever and will have identifiers for subjects long after those efforts and their successors are long forgotten.
Some of those identifiers are still in use today and will survive well into the future. Others are historical curiosities.
Moreover, when it was necessary to distinguish between identifiers and the things identified, that need was met.
Entire the WWW and its poster child, Tim Berners-Lee.
It was Tim Berners-Lee who created the problem Richard frames as: “the difference between a thing and a description of that thing.”
Amazing how much fog of discussion there has been to cover up that amateurish mistake.
The problem isn’t one of conflicting world views (a la Jeni Tennison) but rather how given a bare URI, how to interpret it? Given the bad choices made in the Garden of the Web as it were.
That we simply abandon bare URIs as a solution has never darkened their counsel. They would rather impose the 303/TBL burden on everyone rather than admit to fundamental error.
I have a better solution.
The rest of us should carry on with the identifiers that we want to use, whether they be URIs or not. Whether they are prior identifiers or new ones. And we should put forth statements/standards/documents to establish how in our contexts, those identifiers should be used.
If IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and a few other adventurers decide that IT can benefit from some standard terminology, I am sure they can influence others to use it. Whether composed of URIs or not. And the same can be said for many other domains, most of who will do far better than the W3C at fashioning identifiers for themselves.
Take heart TAG and LOD advocates.
As the poem says: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled identifiers yearning to be used.”
Someday your identifiers will be preserved as well.