- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 21:56:19 -0400
- To: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>
- Cc: AWWSW TF <public-awwsw@w3.org>
On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 11:52 -0400, Jonathan Rees wrote: > I always have a hard time remembering whether an RDF graph is an > information resource or not, . . . I think asking "whether an X is an information resource" is the wrong question. I don't think it is a matter of discovering a naturally occurring entity and then deciding whether that thing *is* an "information resource". An "information resource" is role within the web architecture (and semantic web architecture). I think a more appropriate question would be to ask "whether X *should* play the role of an 'information resource'" (and hence return "representations" in 200 responses). The standard TAG guidance is to mint different URIs for different things: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#URI-collision and this (I believe) is the basis for suggesting that a person or a dog should not play the role of an "information resource": one is likely to wish to separately refer to the dog as distinct from the web page about the dog. However, there is no clear, hard and fast distinction between (naturally occurring) things that *should* play the role of "information resource" and those that should not. Whether X should play this role depends on what you want to accomplish. For one application, it might be best to view X as an "information resource" (and hence configure a web server to return 200 responses with "representations"), whereas for another it may be best to view X as distinct from the "information resource" that provides representations describing X. The overriding point is that, whether or not something is a "information resource" is a *choice*: it isn't a matter of putting the Hogwarts sorting hat on X to find out whether X *is* an information resource by nature. It's a matter of *deciding* whether to view X as an information resource when one mints a URI for X. And by the httpRange-14 rule, if you configure your server to give 200 responses, you have indicated that you have chosen to view X as an "information resource" (in addition to whatever else it might be). -- 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 Thursday, 13 May 2010 01:56:46 UTC