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

I never said this was the end of the story. When ordinary words fail,
and they have, over and over in this endeavor, one retreats to formal
modeling and empiricism. If we can possibly get past this
generic-resource stuff, which I know everyone is tired of, then maybe
we can start talking about things that have consequences. But I don't
see how we can possibly have a fruitful discussion if we have no
common ground, and this is the only way I see to find it.

Partly I'm hoping for "No, but that's ridiculous" responses when I ask
questions like does there exist a "top" or "bottom" generic resource,
or can you have two grs with the same trace, or multiple reps for the
same parameter set, or a gr that's not on the web, or a gr that says
totally different things in its French and Spanish representations,
etc. I never seem to succeed in provoking them, so any hopes of
getting interesting false statements or audit opportunities fades.

I, too, have a hard time figuring out how to make "has representation"
falsifiable, and an even harder time communicating to certain people
that there is even an issue. It sounds like Noah has run against the
same roadblock. If we can get consensus that, as you suggest, it is
*not* falsifiable, and there is no way *not* to follow web
architecture (at least with regard to representations) without
violating HTTP, then that will be real progress! But even then, we
should only declare success after we have successfully communicated
what we have learned.

Jonathan

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Alan Ruttenberg
<alanruttenberg@gmail.com> wrote:
> For the moment I will simply point out that one of the initiations of
> this group was that we wanted to be precise about how one would do an
> audit to see whether a server was was conforming to web architecture.
> It seems to me your answer is "you look at the representations and
> decide". That isn't a particularly satisfying answer, but if that's
> it, then we might as well shut the thing down and declare success.
>
> -Alan
>
> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 1:10 PM, Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org> wrote:
>>> Right, and I have no way to assess (so far) what is or isn't evidence
>>> other than the response code being 200.
>>
>> You look at it. If G is Moby Dick, and the entity isn't a wa-representation
>> of Moby Dick, then the URI isn't meant to name Moby Dick.
>

Received on Tuesday, 26 May 2009 18:17:56 UTC