Jonathan, Great comments! One little note: > From: Jonathan Rees > . . . > "Information resources" - the definition in terms of "essential > characteristics" is useless, since it is neither objective, accurate, > or precise. We don't need a rigorous definition, just one that helps > us to distinguish IR's from non-IR's most of the time, and perhaps to > answer the question of when distinct URI's denote the same IR. Several > alternative definitions have been proposed, such as John Cowan's "a > resource that we are willing to identify with its representations" and > David Booth's "a networked source of representations". (See > http://wiki.neurocommons.org/InformationResource .) The requirement > for a definition should be admitted first; the actual definition > itself is less important. > . . . . FWIW, I've slightly updated my proposed definition of information resource to include the word "sink": http://dbooth.org/2006/identity/#propdefir [[ a network source/sink of representations ]] because some information resources are more about consuming information than producing information. For example, consider a confessional site that allows you to submit your confession, but the only "representation" it ever gives out -- with an HTTP 200 Okay status code of course -- is "Thank you. You are absolved." David Booth, Ph.D. HP Software +1 617 629 8881 office | dbooth@hp.com http://www.hp.com/go/softwareReceived on Friday, 1 June 2007 03:51:01 GMT
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