network endpoints

One thing I would like to add to my diagram: A box for "network  
endpoint" with the meaning of a real-world source of  
awww:representations (e.g. a "web page" operationally defined by the  
process of sending an HTTP request specifying a particular resource- 
name string to a particular server, using the Internet, and so on).  
This is an interesting class of things that David Booth has  
articulated on a number of occasions. Tim and others have clearly  
said that these things are *not* IRs. I think it's more useful to say  
*how* endpoints relate to the intended information resources /  
denotations than to just say that they're not information resources.

"Endpoint" would be placed near "value cloud" in the diagram and  
would be related to "value" by a relationship "responds to 200  
with ... (at time t)" and to "information resource" by another  
relationship that's analogous to "faithful to" i.e. for all time t  
any value delivered is a kr-representation of the state of the  
information resource.

An "endpoint" could also be related to a "value cloud" via  
composition of relationships, but that would probably be clutter.

Once all of these separate entities are defined we can start to talk  
about the relationships and invariants between them - e.g. does every  
endpoint have an associated IR? Are there endpoints whose URIs do not  
denote information resources? Are there endpoints for which the URI  
denotes an information resources but that is not faithful to that IR?  
For me it is this kind of question (not necessarily these particular  
ones) that will be useful in cracking the question of web semantics.

None of this is to say I understand as well as Tim does what things  
can be "information resources" and what things can't... but I'm very  
happy to know that the URI does *not* generally denote the value  
cloud and that the value cloud isn't even part of or determined by  
the information resource. (Constrained, yes, but not determined.)

I'll make the change in a day or two or three if I hear no outcry.

Jonathan

On Apr 15, 2008, at 8:34 PM, Jonathan Rees wrote:

> Revised diagram based on this morning's meeting is here:
>
> http://sw.neurocommons.org/2008/inforesource.pdf
>
> (N.b. that's PDF, not PNG.)
>
> I've renamed 'abstract document' to 'information resource' since  
> the consensus was that they're the same.
> The main reason to include the 'value cloud' in the diagram is to  
> help me understand how 'information resource' relates to Fielding's  
> formal definition of 'resource'.
>
> Let me know how you like it.
>
> Jonathan
>
>>
>> http://sw.neurocommons.org/2008/inforesource.png
>>
>> which I will not take the time to prettify now (I don't know why  
>> the background is gray)
>>

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 2008 13:30:09 UTC