Re: [Fwd: RE: "information resource"]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2004 at 07:03:01PM -0700, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> DCMI did that not because they needed to differentiate between documents
> and dogs, but rather because they needed to limit the scope of 
> discussion
> to a reasonably understood set of resources.  Web Architecture doesn't
> care.  The semantic web isn't going to care either -- the assertions 
> being
> made are either going to be well-defined (and thus testable) or poorly
> defined and unlikely to be useful.  In either case, it isn't the types
> of resources that matter: what matters is how well the predicates are
> defined to distinguish what is being said about the object URI.

I'm surprised to hear you say that, Roy.  I believe that the Semantic
Web will care because one needs to be able to merge graphs without prior
knowledge of what's being merged.  If the target of an assertion varies
as a function of the definition of the predicate, that will not be
possible.

Though I can't find it right now, some time ago on www-tag you
suggested, IIRC, that the Semantic Web could use a function to
disambiguate between when the target of the assertion was the resource
vs. a representation of the resource.  I believe this is a superior
approach to what I interpret you to be suggesting above, as would any
other approach which added additional information to a triple to
license a recipient to determine what the target of the assertion was.

Cheers,

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca

Received on Monday, 18 October 2004 14:16:17 UTC