Re: Meaning of property "url"

A record in a database can refer to a person, and does so with a "key."

Think of a URI as a database key for the worlds most ridiculously
disorganized database (the internet).

If a hundred different articles all mention Bach, how does a computer
program know they all refer to the same Bach (Johann? Sebastian?
Offen?)?
By agreeing that some URI (for the wikipedia page, for example) is the
key for a single guy, and then referring to that URI in your markup,
we can all know we're talking about the same thing.

So, no- there is no big philosophical issue with having URIs for people.

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 10:00 AM, Michael Hopwood <michael@editeur.org> wrote:
> "Any information that can be named... e.g... a person..." There may be some philosophical issues there; is a person "information"?
>
> Sure, an antelope in a zoo may be a document (http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/maack/BrietPrePress.htm) but isn't this taking it a little far? ;)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ed.summers@gmail.com [mailto:ed.summers@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Ed Summers
> Sent: 23 October 2012 15:43
> To: Cord Wiljes
> Cc: public-vocabs@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Meaning of property "url"
>
> On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 7:27 AM, Cord Wiljes <cwiljes@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de> wrote:
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>>> (schema.org's "url" property) means something very specific:
>>> "this is the Web location of" _____ (where ______ is some network
>>> addressable digital file).
>>
>> That is what I thought, too. But the I wonder why:
>>
>> "url" is a property of class "Thing" (instead of just class
>> "CreativeWork") there is no property "homepage" for class "Person" or
>> "website" for class "Organization"
>
> The notion of a URI identifying a "file" is terribly antiquated. So many URIs identify resources that have representations (html) assembled on the fly as the result of queries to databases and whatnot. I prefer to think that url being a property of Thing was an intentional move, because the author chose to sidestep the
> httpRange-14 issue, and let URLs identify any type of resource, as is the case in Roy Fielding's description of resource:
>
> """
> The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource. Any information that can be named can be a resource: a document or image, a temporal service (e.g. "today's weather in Los Angeles"), a collection of other resources, a non-virtual object (e.g. a person), and so on. [1] """
>
> //Ed
>
> [1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch_style.htm#sec_5_2_1_1
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 23 October 2012 15:08:33 UTC