mini issue-57 doc feedback

Working from the "/latest" on 24th March

1.1 Information Resources
I'm not sure about the "generic" terminology, I feel it may be better to 
invert and define a "fixed" information resource instead and drop any 
mention of representation, so the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs could be 
changed to:

[[
Each information resource has one or more associated versions, each 
having fixed content (octet sequence) and interpretation directives 
(media type, language). An information resource having only one version 
is said to be /fixed/. No particular meaning is implied by the word 
"version" the word is chosen as suggestive of its most common use.

One can apply metadata properties such as author, title, and topic to 
versions in the obvious way. These properties extend to information 
resources in a systematic way, as follows: if a property is shared by 
all of an information resource's versions, then we say that the 
information resource possesses the property, and vice versa.
]]

Question:
How do you write metadata about a single version?

Personal gut answer:
Each IR(u1) is associated with a non empty set of versions SV. For any v 
in SV, if content-location(v u2) and u2 is not equal to u1, then v is 
associated with IR(u1) and IR(u2). If v is the only version in SV 
associated with IR(u2) then IR(u2) is a fixed information resource and v 
is it's only reading.

Works for me, also means that the following ir-axiom is vital (I've 
changed "readings" to "versions"):
"Let P be a metadata property, let R be an 'information resource', and 
let x be a member of the range of P. Then P(R,x) if and only if P(S,x) 
holds for all versions S of R."

.. and obviously means that content-location would need to be a metadata 
property (as http etc already defines it to be), and also means that the 
'ol "Content-Location instead of 303" proposal that IanD suggested last 
year means trading off the ability to speak of "versions" (and directly 
goes against the http specification the reason content location is there).

Will send more feedback under separate cover, breaking it in to 
manageable chunks!

Best,

Nathan

Received on Thursday, 24 March 2011 01:44:48 UTC