David, hello.

On 2010 Nov 6, at 20:42, David Booth wrote:

Yes, when I phrased this, I did indeed mean it as an analytic-must rather than
an rfc2119-synthetic-must (this is the distinction you're making, yes?)

Indeed, because the decision defines what an IR is, so that Ian's toucan is
necessarily an IR in the sense in which that term is currently defined.

(Ian can of course speak for himself, but...)

I take it that Ian is suggesting resolving the ambiguity he has created, and
thus the need for any heuristics, by extending the notion of IR in such a way
that a URI with a 200 response *is* an IR, *unless* dereferencing it returns RDF
which (authoritatively) declares that the URI is a NIR.

The suggestion does mean that the toucan URI, since it now identifies a toucan,
cannot also identify the toucan's webpage, which is therefore unnamed. I don't
know if that's a problem or not (maybe it is, if you want to be able to say "I
got this information about the toucan called </toucan> from <X>"). If it's a
problem, then perhaps the </toucan> URI could point towards a </toucan.rdf> URI
which contains the same RDF as </toucan>, but which is still an IR. Then
</toucan.rdf> is the toucan's webpage.

Best wishes,

Norman