Re: [httpRange-14] What is an Information Resource?

Sean Palmer writes:

> Ian Davis asked Tim on IRC whether an RDF Graph is an 
> information resource [1], and Tim replied "no".

For what it's worth, I think Tim and I agree about 85% on which things are 
IRs, but on this one I think we disagree.  Tim has suggested from time to 
time that he thinks of IRs as more or less the same as documents.  I don't 
think of RDF Graphs as documents.  For me, documents have a beginning a 
middle and an end, and RDF graphs don't.  Unlike Tim (or at least unlike 
what I understand to be Tim's position), I think an RDF graph is not a 
document, but is an IR.  I believe that an RDF graph is pretty completely 
characterized by a set of triples.  I believe I can, with suitable 
agreements between sender and receiver about the encoding (as we require 
for all information transmission), I can transmit those triples with 
complete fidelity, and a receiver could reproduce them with no loss at 
all.  Q.E.D. 

Of course, this begs the question as to whether a focus on documents or 
IRs (I.e. as I define them) will be more helpful as the basis for Web 
architecture moving forward.  Insofar as we're trying to indicate with a 
200 that "this representation is of the resource identified" (as opposed 
to being a representation of a resource that's about or related to the 
resource identified), I see no conflict in saying that an RDF graph is an 
IR, that such IRs can be idenfitied with URIs, and that a 200 is a 
suitable status code to use when, for example, returning the N3 or RDF/XML 
that encodes the graph so identified.  What am I missing?

Noah

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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