Re: JAR's exploration of TimBL's notion of information resource

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 6:14 AM, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org> wrote:
> I'm also going to make a quick note:
>
> I think a good deal of confusion could be avoided by just ditching the
> idea of conceptualizing a resource as a set of representations,
> perhaps indexed by time/HTTP requests. This is the "FTTR" hypothesis
> (I'm not sure if Roy would actually agree this is his hypothesis
> also). It's great what work JAR has done thinking through generic
> resources and their parameters of possible wa:representations.
> However, trying to define a resource as just a set of
> wa:representations is not a really good idea without some more steps,
> steps that may undermine "defining" the URI.

The only person trying to do this was David. Tim has clearly said that
the wa-representations do not in themselves determine the resource.
I'm trying to draw
a clear distinction by introducing the notion of a generic resource's "trace".
The trace isn't the GR, any more than the graph of measurements of
a room's humidity is the room's humidity.

> Here's a simple example - "relative URIs in wa:representations".
>
> You can have two *identical* sets of representations given in response
> to a single URI. However, the URIs they link to, if they are using
> relative URIs, are not identical and can change the meaning of the
> document, as well as what you can access mechanically from it.
>
> Thus, to conceptualize representations properly, you would at least
> have to absolutize all relative URIs.

This seems like a good thing to model. But there has been general (and
hard-won) agreement in this group that an HTTP entity is a
wa-representation. You'd have to invent a new class whose individuals
possess a binding for the base URI. We could call it an
hh-representation...  (What is Moby Dick's base URI, though?)

Received on Tuesday, 26 May 2009 12:44:51 UTC