Re: NIR SIDETRACK Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

On 3/27/12 7:59 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
> This seems an appropriate place for me to drop in my 2 cents.
>
> I like the 303 trick. People that care about this stuff can use it
> (and appear to be doing so), but it doesn't really matter too much
> that people that don't care don't use it. It seems analogous to the
> question of HTML validity. Best practices suggest creating valid
> markup, but if it isn't perfect, it's not a big deal, most UAs will be
> able to make sense of it. There will be reduced fidelity of
> communication, sure, but there will be imperfections in the system
> whatever, so any trust/provenance chain will have to consider such
> issues anyway.
> So I don't really think Jeni's proposal is necessary, but don't feel
> particularly strongly one way or the other.
>
> Philosophically I reckon the flexibility of what a representation of a
> resource can be means that the notion of an IR isn't really needed.
> I've said this before in another thread somewhere, but if the network
> supported the media type "thing/dog" then it would be possible to GET
> http://example.org/Basil with full fidelity. Right now it doesn't, but
> I'd argue that what you could get with media type "image/png" would
> still be a valid, if seriously incomplete representation of my dog. In
> other words, a description of a thing shares characteristics with the
> thing itself, and that's near enough for HTTP representation purposes.
>
> Cheers,
> Danny.
>

Amen!!

We have resources that just 'mention' or 'refer' to *things* loosely 
i.e., you typical Web page.
RDF introduce resources that explicitly 'describe'  unambiguously named 
*things* via URIs.
RDFS & OWL introduces resources that explicitly 'define' unambiguously 
named *things* such as classes and properties via URIs.
Linked Data (or Hyperdata0 introduces resources that explicitly 
'describe' and 'define' unambiguously named *things* via de-referencable 
URIs.

When all is said an done, all of the above boils down to *representation 
fidelity* that one could order (hierarchically) as follows:

1. generic representation -- Web Pages
2. description oriented representation -- RDF which may or may not 
follow Linked Data principles
3. definition oriented representation -- RDFS, OWL, which may or may not 
follow Linked Data principles.


BTW -- I've published a work in progress post [1] that includes some 
diagrams (including the original WWW proposal depiction) re. Data, 
Documents, Content, URIs, and URLs.

Links:

1. http://goo.gl/DRvQM -- Understanding Data .

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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