[tm-pubsubj-comment] Published vs Public

[Bernard Vatant <bernard.vatant@mondeca.com>]

In the process of re-drafting Deliverable 1 (release early, release often) I stumbled on a
very important ambiguity we have discussed on n' off but that was never written down
anywhere, although there seems to be a consensus on it.

ISO 13250 defines Public Subject when we speak, after XTM 1.0, about Published Subject.

The first one tends to say implicitly - but I think never explicitly - that a PSI should
be publicly available, which could be easily understood as "a PSI should be publicly
available to anyone on the Web through a public URI without any access restriction". And I
guess most people think about that when they think about PSI. Basically they are wrong
IMO, or at least they see only this obvious case, not maybe the most likely to happen.

Published is more generic. It means there is a publication space, which could be of course
as wide as the open Web, but also as closed as a firmly secured intranet. As suggested in
my previous message answering Murray and Eric, for all sorts of reasons (security,
critical transactions, classified information), closed networks are more likely to be
early adopters of efficient subject identification than open Web applications. I know
already of major customers interested internally by the PSI mechanism: they deal with
millions+ of subjects ... that will never show in public Web space. I do not know of
public portals wanting to use PSI so far ... It figures ...

So it seems to me that Deliverable 1 introduction should take that point into account, and
replace existing references to the "Web" (semantic or otherwise) to a more generic
"network" defined as a system where humans and machines want to exchange information about
subjects, and where resources that network's members have access to are addressable
through URIs (definition subject to re-wording). The same way we moved the specification
from specific "topic maps" to a more generic "applications" ...

Waiting the consensus on that to furbish the prose accordingly - not much to do actually.

Thoughts?

Bernard