Re: AWWSW status (F2F prep)

A positive message on the www-tag list would say I'm not alone in
saying these nutty things... that might be helpful
Thanks
Jonathan

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 2:38 PM, Michael Hausenblas
<michael.hausenblas@deri.org> wrote:
>
> Perfectly fine with me - thanks a lot for the brilliant summary. Shall I
> reply on TAG list or is sufficient, here that I agree with it?
>
> Cheers,
>      Michael
>
> --
> Dr. Michael Hausenblas
> LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre
> DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
> NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
> Ireland, Europe
> Tel. +353 91 495730
> http://linkeddata.deri.ie/
> http://sw-app.org/about.html
>
>
>
>> From: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
>> Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:35:05 -0400
>> To: AWWSW TF <public-awwsw@w3.org>
>> Subject: Fwd: AWWSW status (F2F prep)
>> Resent-From: AWWSW TF <public-awwsw@w3.org>
>> Resent-Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:35:41 +0000
>>
>> sorry, i had to send this off without your review, as i was already 4
>> days late on my tag f2f prep. hope it's ok.
>>
>> -Jonathan
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
>> Date: Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 2:15 PM
>> Subject: AWWSW status (F2F prep)
>> To: www-tag@w3.org
>>
>> AWWSW status (F2F prep)
>>
>> The AWWSW group was started because Alan Ruttenberg and I were doing
>> quite a bit of ontology design and ontology advising and didn't
>> understand the resource/representation relationship (and the
>> "information resource" idea, which is intimately bound up with it)
>> well enough to do our work or guide others.  The question comes up
>> when you have things that you want to give a URI to, and you want to
>> use 200 responses (non-# non-303 URI), but want to be protected
>> against someone coming along later and saying "hey, that's not an
>> information resource," or "but you said it's an IR, and that implies
>> xxx" where you don't mean to say xxx, or "that's an IR, but not the one
>> you want it to be".
>>
>> This is dual (equivalent) to the question: Suppose you get 200
>> responses, is it OK to then decide that the named resource
>> is some particular thing or has certain properties?  E.g., if I am
>> the owner of dx.doi.org, can I say that the URI
>> http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbn051 names the journal article
>> that's indicated in the representation (so that I can license others to use
>> the URI when recording metadata)?  (Note that this is a subtle
>> example.  The httpRange-14 rule by itself is not adequate to rule this in or
>> out.  In particular the representation might fail to be "of" the
>> journal article even if we decide the journal article is an IR.  Also
>> there is redirection involved, which complicates things further.)
>>
>> Alan and I approached the TAG, which said essentially "you figure it out."
>> (Shortly thereafter I discovered that I was on the TAG.)
>>
>> Some ontologies where this is an issue include FRBR, Dublin Core,
>> Bibo, SWAN, CiTO, IAO, and IRW, but as the practice of metadata
>> deployment, document and media annotation, etc. increases
>> (perhaps with the help of the Link: header?), I expect there to be
>> many more.
>>
>> A broader motivation, which I share with TimBL, is that if we had a
>> logical framework (perhaps expressible in RDF or OWL), we'd have a
>> tool that we could use to help clear up a number of number of web
>> architecture muddles.  httpRange-14 is just an example; another
>> recent one on www-tag was "are HTML elements information
>> resources?"
>>
>> A third motivation is that an RDF vocabulary for webarch could be
>> useful in a number of application domains, e.g. testing and
>> validation, or recording change logs (e.g. Memento), or "HTTP over
>> SPARQL", or further developing Tim's generic resources ontology
>> (genont).
>>
>> Additional concerns have been raised in the group about how
>> URIs might become bound to things, but I have not pursued
>> this (yet). My current theory is that URI binding is a personal matter
>> subject to your belief set, and how you come to that is your
>> own business. You may choose to let what happens on the
>> Web influence your beliefs, and there may be a recommended
>> elective way to allow this to happen, and
>> perhaps an outcome of this project, in the future, might be
>> such a way.
>>
>> I can't say we've made a lot of visible progress, but I think I do
>> understand the problem better now that I did before.
>>
>> First, Roy Fielding is right: We're not just talking about HTTP
>> semantics, but rather the semantics of that part of web architecture
>> that is expressible in HTTP.  This includes the
>> resource/representation relationship, the various redirects (including
>> 303), and possibly existence (creation and deletion).  I think webarch
>> as deployed might include REST as a subset, but certainly there are
>> resources deployed using GET+200 that do not obey REST discipline, and
>> we need to account for these somehow.
>>
>> Second, TimBL has provided more information about his view of what is
>> and isn't an information resource, and he thinks they're like.  I have
>> been unable so far (my
>> inadequacy) to combine these use cases with other constraints (such as
>> grandfathering all possible web pages) into an actionable definition
>> that makes sense to me, but I continue to work at it.
>>
>> Third, "authoritative" per the updated http: URI scheme in HTTPbis is,
>> I think, orthogonal to the R/R problem.  The "authoritative" responses
>> do not determine the resource uniquely, they only say that it belongs
>> to a class of resources that participate in the R/R relationships
>> communicated by the responses.  A contradiction between an
>> "authoritative" response and other information believed about the
>> resource might lead you to discount the "authoritative" response (as
>> recommended by the GBIF persistent identifiers report) or to
>> stop using that URI to name the resource, just as easily as it might
>> lead you to doubt what you thought you knew about the resource.
>>
>> Of course, the ability of an agent to speak HTTP-authoritatively about
>> a resource may be due to the agent's ability to control the resource
>> and therefore its "representations". For these particular resources,
>> the R/R relationship holds because the agent says so. For others
>> (such as Moby Dick) it might hold in spite of what the agent says.
>>
>> I am concentrating on the resource/representation relationship.  My
>> ambition is that if we have a story about when this holds and doesn't
>> hold - in particular how to falsify it - then answering the
>> question "what is an information resource" will fall out as a side
>> effect: an IR is simply something which happens to be able to
>> participate in this relationship.
>>
>> So far the best lead I've encountered so far in understanding the
>> relationship is ABLP logic, as is being pursued by Dan Connolly.  It
>> may be that ABLP can't be used directly, as convincing someone that a
>> web page is a principal, or that "principal" has any ontological
>> consequence, might be a tough sell.  Or it may be that this, too, is
>> an ontological wild goose chase, or that ABLP is about
>> the URI/resource relationship instead of the resource/representation
>> relationship.  But it's worth pursuing.
>>
>> Open issues on which these considerations impinge:
>>  ISSUE-50 URNs and registries - persistence vs. trust in "authority"
>>  ISSUE-57 HTTP redirections - consequences of 30x
>>  ISSUE-63 metadata architecture - metadata for http:-named resources
>>  ISSUE-53 generic resources (appears to be closeable)
>>
>> Next step (for me): Look in more detail at the kinds of metadata,
>> including class memberships, one might want to write using the
>> abovementioned ontologies for some sample resources,
>> and attempt to generalize from there.
>>
>> I'll try to have slideware ready in time for the F2F.
>>
>> Thanks to Michael Hausenblas and David Booth for their help.
>> This email is in the first person because they haven't
>> seen it to agree with it or not, but I am happy to expand
>> "I" to "we" for anything they want to take credit for above.
>> Thanks also to many others including Alan, Tim, Harry Halpin,
>> Stuart Williams, and Noah for their contributions.
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>> too pressed for time to look up URIs for all the things cited. here
>> are the obscurest ones:
>> memento:
>> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/memento_protocol-based_time_travel_for_th
>> e_web.php
>> gbif: http://www2.gbif.org/Persistent-Identifiers.pdf
>> iao: http://code.google.com/p/information-artifact-ontology/
>> genont: www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Generic.html
>> the others you should be able to get from google or tracker.
>>
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 19:22:04 UTC