Fwd: Last minute input to discussion re 'on the boundaries of content negotiation in the context of the Web of Data'

Fodder for our ontology? ...


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
Date: Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 10:13 AM
Subject: Re: Last minute input to discussion re 'on the boundaries of
content    negotiation in the context of the Web of Data'
To: wangxiao@musc.edu
Cc: Michael Hausenblas <michael.hausenblas@deri.org>, "www-tag@w3.org"
<www-tag@w3.org>, "timbl@w3.org" <timbl@w3.org>, Richard Cyganiak
<richard@cyganiak.de>


On 20/2/09 16:02, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
>
> Michael Hausenblas wrote:
>>
>> Dear TAG members, Tim, Richard,
>>
>> Short version: an attempt to defined non-information resources without
>> using
>> non-information resource ;)
>
> I am not sure your proposal will work (see below). But here is the
> fundamental question: what is the purpose?
> Unlike if we know "x is a Human", we can infer that "x has (at least)
> one head", I wonder what more "x is an IR" tells me except "x is an IR".

I'm not a fan of the notion of IR. But here is a possible use case:
digital preservation.

"A thing that is an IR, is a thing whose entire state can be
serialized as a bytestream. Coupled with the use of standard names for
agreed media formats, this gives us a solid foundation for digital
preservation strategies. If it is an IR, we know we can preserve it by
preserving the 0s and 1s, alongside information aiding their
interpretation. If is not an IR, we know that archiving 0s and 1s are
insufficient to preserve it."
(OAIS is one rich methodology for maintaining such an archive).

This "IRs as bytestream-serializable things" reading is agnostic about
whether non (web/http) IRs can be considered informational in some
broader sense (eg. books, abstract intellectual works, and other
FRBRish puzzles).

My story here ignores dependencies across resources, composite
resources etc., but I expect that part of the story could be repaired.
The main suggestion is that IRs are just digitally serializable
things.

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Friday, 20 February 2009 15:18:49 UTC