RE: metadata vs. meta-(meta)-data

(Following up on an offline question about relation of
'tag' to 'ttdb' (The Thing Described By))

The "tag" scheme you (Sandro) have proposed makes no
commitment about the resource it designates, at all. It's
completely unbounded; you're saying that a 'tag' is a
uniform and unique identifier without ever making any
commitment that there's a resource. As such, a 'tag' doesn't
itself identify a resource (in the same way that a http
URL carries along with it an implicit notion that it locates
a resource that's served by a HTTP server.)

The only utility of 'tag' URIs would be to use them
in systems that wanted to supply all of their own
extrinsic binding of URI to semantics.

So your proposal is fundamentally different than
'ttdb'; in 'ttdb', I propose explicitly binding the
URI to "the resource described by the resource identified by".

In fact, I could combine the two things, and make

ttdb:<date>:<uri>

as 'the thing described by <uri> on <date>'

   ttdb:2001:http://www.w3.org

is a URI for "The World Wide Web Consortium, as described
by http://www.w3.org at the start of 2001".

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2001 22:34:12 UTC