Re: another crack at 'information resource'

On Nov 8, 2010, at 11:50 AM, Jonathan Rees wrote:

> Another attempt at an 'information resource' theory.
> 
> (I mean 'information resource' in a sense close to TimBL's, not
> in David's sense.)
> 
> As I said earlier, if you assume you're doing design (architecture)
> and not ontology (what exists), the problem gets easier, since you're not
> constrained by reality, truth, etc.; you don't have to be able to
> "identify" information resources in the sense of pointing your
> finger at them, or falsify the "is a representation of" relation.
> 
> Rather than try to figure out what IRs are, let's try talking about what we
> would like to say about them, i.e. properties that they're supposed to
> have, and then if the question remains, speculate on what we'd like
> them to be like in general.
> 
> Many of the properties that one would like to assert are about
> content: author, title, date written or published, subject matter.
> These properties can vary from one observer to the next, or
> through time: the author, etc. might vary, so we have to decide how
> the properties of the IR relate to the properties of its
> 'representations.'
> 
> It doesn't do much good to assert a content property if it can't be
> corroborated by someone else observing the IR [credit Larry
> Masinter], therefore I propose the
> principle that a content property is true of an information resource
> iff it's true of *all* of the resource's representations.  E.g.
> 
> 

Hmm. Not sure if you mean to cast your net this widely, but there are plenty of counterexamples to this as a general principle. A particular photograph of an artwork might well be credited to (and owned by) the photographer, not the artist of the original work. Prints of engravings vary enormously in price depending on whether they were pulled by the artist or by someone else from the artist's plates: often it takes arcane expertise to be able to tell them apart. Im sure there are similar examples from the worlds of music and other arts. 

Pat


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Received on Monday, 8 November 2010 20:18:30 UTC