Re: Roy's definition of a REST resource as a "Curried" form of ftrr:IR

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 1:18 PM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> Nathan,
>
> Have you looked at the definition of IR that I proposed a while back?
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-awwsw/2008Apr/0046.html
> It is logically equivalent to Roy's definition of a REST resource, ...

I would not call either of these definitions. They are models, or
theories, or formalisms - they predict certain properties of IRs. But
they are not a good match to any plausible ontology of IRs since they
entail ridiculous conclusions such as "Moby Dick is a function" and
"the domain of the Declaration of Independence is time".

I'm not saying it's a useless idea, or not predictive, or that we
shouldn't talk about it. I'm just asking everyone to stop calling
these things definitions and start calling them what they are. As
Nathan has pointed out, Roy's paper has three mutually inconsistent
"definitions" of "resource". The paper makes much more sense if you
just treat the function "definition" as a mistake: He should have said
something like "We can model resources as functions ..." and you
(David) should do something similar.

Jonathan

Received on Friday, 4 March 2011 18:41:29 UTC