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

on Mon. Jan. 07, 2008 at 9:13 PM, John Cowan wrote:
>
> John Black scripsit:
>
>> Isn't this assumption false with respect to the web? In general, I have 
>> no
>> idea what states the resources I visit may be in. Any given resource may 
>> be
>> a novel, a song, a picture, an email message, a movie,  a blog post, 
>> etc.,
>> etc. How could I possibly know the N possible states that 8 billion
>> resources can be in?
>
> We can if we set some reasonable upper limit to the size of a
> representation.  For example, if we say that 1 TB is such an upper limit,
> then the resource is in one of about 2^(10^15) states, given that there
> are about 10^2 media types and there are ~ 10 bits/byte.

But both the abstract trees of Noah's recent imaginings and the mathematical 
abstractions of Pat's original examples are resources that can be infinite - 
or finite but exceeding any "reasonable" limit that you set on their 
representations. So perhaps we should say that any finite or reasonably 
small RDF graph may be an "information resource", but that RDF graphs and 
abstract trees, in general, are not. Sorry, but IMO that sounds broken to 
me.

John Black
www.kashori.com

> -- 
> The Unicode Standard does not encode            John Cowan
> idiosyncratic, personal, novel, or private      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> use characters, nor does it encode logos
> or graphics.                                    cowan@ccil.org
> 

Received on Tuesday, 8 January 2008 02:59:23 UTC