Re: Principals

On 11/20/12 5:04 PM, Nathan wrote:
> Henry Story wrote:
>> On 20 Nov 2012, at 22:39, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> All,
>>>
>>> More for reference purposes, since it isn't going into the WebID spec.
>>>
>>> WebDAV Access Control Ext. Spec [1]:
>>>
>>>      A "principal" is a distinct human or computational actor that
>>>      initiates access to network resources.  In this protocol, a
>>>      principal is an HTTP resource that represents such an actor.
>>
>>
>> you can see that this is already confused.
>>   1. it says a principal is a distinct human or computation actor
>>   2. that a principal is an http resource that represents an actor.
>>
>> Which is it? The resource that represents the actor, or the actor?
>
> Both, this ties in with WebID exactly.
>
> 1. principal = agent (machine agent or human agent)
> 2. principal identifier = a dereferencable HTTP URI which identifies a 
> principal (agent).
>
> The "represents" is just age old wording and conflation nuances, you 
> could rewrite the quote to read:
>
>   A "principal" is a distinct human or computational agent that
>   initiates access to network resources.  In this protocol, a
>   principal is identified by an HTTP URI, which upon dereferencing
>   provides a representation of a description of the principal.
>
> Which is loosely equivalent to what's defined in WebID 1.0.
>
> Make sense?
>
>
>
Amen !!


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
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OpenLink Software
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