Re: AWWSW Telecon Tuesday 2011-08-30 ?

Jonathan Rees writes:

> And I haven't gotten much feedback on
> http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/awwsw/ir/latest/ , which to me pretty
> much answers to my satisfaction the question that created this group
> (at the HCLS/TAG meeting way back when): what is this 'information
> resource' deal and what does it have to do with the price of eggs?

Note that some recent comments from DBooth on this list have referred
to an earlier version of this document [1], but I'm explicitly
addressing the version dated 2011-06-25 [2].

I know some participants on this list don't like it much, but I really
think you need to reference FRBR in section 2.  I don't mean that you
have to _define_ information entity using the FRBR vocabulary, but you
should point to FRBR as a much more complete working through of the
relationship between various points on a specific/generic hierarchy
for several well-known and widely/naively understood entity classes
which overlap with jar:InformationEntity ( ==
frbr:ProductOfIntellectualOrArtisticEndeavour ?*)

I also think in this regard you need to think harder about being a
_bit_ more explicit/thorough in defining *information entity*, whether
specific or generic.  Yes, the poem example and the tapir analogy
point to something that feels familiar, but it leaves the door open to
a slippery slope (!) at the bottom of which lies 3986-representation,
doesn't it?  Does it offer a clear answer to e.g. the question of
whether these two pages are specialisations of the same generic
information entity:

  http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/felisCatus/cattus.html
  http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/felisCatus/chat.html

given the results of fetching

 http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/felisCatus/

?

I don't think so.

ht

* I.e. frbr:Work U frbr:Expression U frbr:Manifestation U frbr:Item

Which raises an interesting question -- are e.g. the Mona Lisa, the
David, even the Eiffel Tower, information entities?  It's hard to see
how http://smarthistory.org/assets/images/images/leo_mona_face.jpg is
_not_ a specialisation of the Mona Lisa if you accept that
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/graphics/poster_OrigMinard.gif is a
specialisation of Minard's graphic of Napolean's retreat from Moscow,
but that painting certainly has e.g. mass, which would disqualify it
on TimBL's definition as I understand it. . .  Hmm, so does
the original of Minard's graphic.  But not all drawings have paper
originals -- presumably you would definitely want to acknowledge that
there's an information entity somewhere in the picture (:-) in
connection with
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/awwsw/ir/latest/generic.png . . .

Sorry, can't resist -- I suppose you might want to argue that there is
an information entity which is a _photograph_ of the Mona Lisa, or a
_scan_ of Minard's graphic, and that it is specialisations of _those_
which the above URIs allow us to retrieve.  This gets us back to
massless entities.  However I don't think FRBR demands a difference of
Work in cases like this, or even of Expression.  A photocopy of my
copy of Martin Chuzzlewit is, I guess, a Manifestation, and a
photograph or a scan (modulo intent, I suppose) could be considered
the same. . .

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/awwsw/ir/20110517/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/awwsw/ir/20110625/
-- 
       Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
      10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440
                Fax: (44) 131 651-1426, e-mail: ht@inf.ed.ac.uk
                       URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/
 [mail from me _always_ has a .sig like this -- mail without it is forged spam]

Received on Wednesday, 28 September 2011 15:06:57 UTC