misunderstanding at last telecon re AWWW sense of IR

I was very disturbed that we had such a disconnect last time regarding
what I was calling the AWWW sense of "information resource". I've
thought about it a lot and have a hypothesis around the disagreement.

When I said {AWWW sense of IR}, I meant what a competent person, who
is not in the community but has access to AWWW and its referenced
documents (transitively), would understand the term to mean - that is,
based only on what AWWW says, not on any other kind of information,
which would be inaccessible to such a person. I think that person
would look in the glossary and the rest of the text, and take away
whatever it said. If the meaning was Hayes-Halpin ambiguous, well, so
it goes.

When you heard me say {AWWW sense of IR}, I think you understood me as
talking about what the authors of AWWW, or perhaps a subset or maybe
just one, *meant* by "information resource", which possibly is what
any sensible person familiar with the debate would understand it to
mean. (I wouldn't consider myself sensible; clearly I'm incredibly
dense on this  subject.) Perhaps that meaning coincides with "generic
resource" per your design note; that would be nice since then I could
use the design note to help me understand what was intended.

Perhaps the two are *meant* to be the same; my point is just that
absent information that is *outside* AWWW and the design note, a
reasonable person would not be able to conclude that the two are the
same, just (at best) that they *might* be the same, given suitable
interpretations of all the terms in question.

If I thought we were talking about the first, and you thought we were
talking about the second, then I can see how it would be easy for us
to come to blows. I thought I was being very clear by saying "AWWW
sense of IR", and was wrong. If your advice is to ignore that sense as
being uninteresting, misleading, or legalistic, then I will accept and
record that advice, end my futile quest to figure out what a
characteristic is or how to distinguish an essential one from a
nonessential one, and move on to other work.

(I have said repeatedly that I don't want the group to decide what an
IR is, or even to attempt consensus on that. There's no inconsistency,
as my goal here is only to figure out what *you* mean by the term.)

Jonathan

Received on Saturday, 9 May 2009 16:49:24 UTC