The "web page" is the car

On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 10:43:07PM -0800, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> To go back to the car example, if I define a URI scheme "vin" that
> matches the manufacturer's vehicle identification number standard
> and then deploy a resolution mechanism for "vin" using the WWW
> interface, the GET vin:289814678... will consistently result in
> representations of cars that are always in the form of conceptual
> works, because that is what the WWW interface provides in response to
> GET on any URI.  Yet it would be completely unreasonable for the
> Semantic Web to claim that "vin" URIs identify the conceptual work
> and not the car, right?

Are you two in synch about what a "conceptual work" is here?  I'm not
so sure.  From the above, it appears that Roy believe it's the
bag-o-bits representation about the car, while I think that Tim
defines it to be something like "an information object about the car".

As I said in my previous message, I believe those two models to be
equivalent, though it also suggests to me that the "conceptual work"
model is unnecessarily confusing, which can itself cause problems.

For example, Tim writes;

"If a web page is about a car, then the URI can't be used to refer to the web page."
 -- http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTTP-URI.html#L728

Which I believe to be incorrect, because (assuming that "web page" is
the conceptual work, and not the bag-o-bits .. oh, the agony of
nomenclature) there is only one thing; the conceptual work *is* the car.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis