- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:06:06 -0400
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com, AWWSW TF <public-awwsw@w3.org>, "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>
On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 14:26 -0500, Pat Hayes wrote: > On Jun 9, 2009, at 7:40 AM, Jonathan Rees wrote: > > > ... > > (Personally at this point I think that regarding web architecture or > > HTTP semantics I would ditch all the philosophy about "essentially > > information" and "conveyable in a message" and just stick to something > > much more operational and concrete. I agree. What makes an "information resource" relevant to web architecture (and semantic web architecture) is the fact that it can have awww:representations that are returned in response to requests. This is relevant to web architecture because there are protocols for making these requests, media types for interpreting the representations, etc. -- a whole host of specifications that are come into play *if* something is an "information resource". These specifications care nothing about who authored Moby Dick: it isn't relevant. In my view, the architecture should *only* define "information resource" to the extent that it is relevant to the architecture. I.e., the definition should *only* include those characteristics that are needed by the architecture. If a particular resource happens to have characteristics beyond those that qualify it as an "information resource", then that's fine. I see no justification for saying anything more about what characteristics an "information resource" must or must not have. In particular, I see no architectural justification for including any disjointness requirements in the definition of "information resource". > > Absobloodylutely. Trying to use philosophy to clarify architecture is > like trying to do engineering drawing using mud. > > > I'm not sure what that would be; > > maybe start with "on the web" or "can be put on the web" > > No, because sane people (eg Roy) have argued that this would include > galaxies and sodium atoms because these can be referred to "on the > web" (or maybe can be seen using instruments that are physically > attached to the Web; Tim has argued to me that eg Pantone colors count > for this reason, since they can be detected and checked using a > digital colorimeter. At least I think that was his point.). > > > or "suitable > > for use with HTTP" > > Why not, "can emit a response to some kind of access protocol" ? That > seems to handle all the present and all the likely future cases, be > unambiguous, and (by philosophical standards) vividly clear and > unambiguous. I think that's on the right track. And one can think of those things abstractly as functions from time and requests to representations (ftrr:IR). Or, as Roy describes them, as functions from time to representation sets. As I pointed out earlier http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-awwsw/2008Apr/0047.html Roy's function is basically a curried version of ftrr:IR. -- David Booth, Ph.D. Cleveland Clinic (contractor) Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.
Received on Tuesday, 9 June 2009 23:06:39 UTC