Re: on documents and terms [was: RE: [WNET] new proposal WN URIs and related issues]

Pat Hayes wrote:
> 
>> Pat,
>>
>> It sounds like you are mainly disagreeing with the TAG's guidance.
> 
> Indeed.
> 
>>  I
>> think it's important that the working group conform to the TAG's
>> guidance, even if that guidance isn't entirely baked.
> 
> Well, I disagree, when the guidance is this un-baked. I think that 
> conforming at this point is like obeying clearly insane orders, and that 
> we have a duty to disobey. But I understand that others may not agree 
> with this attitude. (I wonder, why do I think of the Charge of the Light 
> Brigade, at this point?)
> 
>>  However, I
>> applaud your efforts to help straighten out our thinking around these
>> issues.  More below.
>>
>>>  From:  Pat Hayes
>>>
>>>  It might be best to start with a definition of what you consider an
>>>  information resource to be. Since the TAG do not define this critical
>>>  term, yet base important engineering decisions on it, any
>>>  authoritative exposition would be of immense value. My current
>>>  understanding is that an information resource is some thing that can
>>>  be transmitted over a network by a transfer protocol. On this
>>>  understanding, one could argue that a word was an information
>>>  resource.
>>
>> Definitely not.  That would be a "representation", not an "information
>> resource".  The information resource is the *source* of
>> "representations" that can be transmitted over a network.

Sorry to butt in, but a couple of minor comments:

"Definitely not" may be technically correct, but I think a bit more 
context is needed here.  The TAG Architecture document says:

"It is conventional on the hypertext Web to describe Web pages, images, 
product catalogs, etc. as “resources”. The distinguishing characteristic 
of these resources is that all of their essential characteristics can be 
conveyed in a message. We identify this set as “information resources.”

This document is an example of an information resource. It consists of 
words and punctuation symbols and graphics and other artifacts that can 
be encoded, with varying degrees of fidelity, into a sequence of bits. 
There is nothing about the essential information content of this 
document that cannot in principle be transfered in a message. In the 
case of this document, the message payload is the representation of this 
document."

So, referring to the next sentence, it would seem that an RDF ontology 
and an HTML web page *are* information resources.  What gets transmitted 
over the wire, however, would be representations of those information 
resources.  Right?

> 
> Ah, I see. Thanks for that clarification. So for example an RDF ontology 
> and an HTML web page are not information resources, either, I take it.

I also note that http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/ (under "URI 
Namespaces") says:

"For small vocabularies, it may be most convenient to serve the entire 
vocabulary in a single Web access. Such a vocabulary would typically use 
a hash namespace, and a Web access (i.e., an HTTP GET request) for any 
term in the vocabulary would return *a single information resource* 
describing all of the terms in the vocabulary." [my emphasis]

So this should be "would return *a representation of* a single 
information resource describing all of the terms in the vocabulary" ?

--Frank

[we now return to our scheduled programming, already in progress]

Received on Friday, 21 April 2006 22:37:05 UTC