Re: AWWSW Telecon Tuesday 2011-08-30 ?

On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 1:09 PM, Henry S. Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> 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?
>
> Backing up to section 3, I realise there's a serious disconnect here.
> One of Heinlein's famous Fair Witnesses might not fall into this trap,
> but I sure did.  I _assumed_, without thinking about it, that having
> written
>
>  Now where does this get us? To say that any representation retrieved
> from "http://example/hen" has (or will have) "Trouvee" as its title,
> we can write (in Turtle [turtle])
>
>    [ir:onWebAt "http://example/hen"] dc:title "Trouvee".
>
> you might well have gone on to write
>
>    [ir:onWebAt "http://example/hen"] dc:creator "Elizabeth Bishop".
>
> But of course that's wrong!

I don't think it's wrong. Why "of course"?

The way I would answer the question, who is the dc:creator, would be
to take the representation (or maybe a presentation - the analysis
isn't detailed enough to be able to say which - but you get the same
answer both ways) to a librarian, and ask them, who is this thing's
dc:creator?  And they will say Elizabeth Bishop. They are very
unlikely to say "where did you get that from?" - and if they did, the
answer might be, I found it at ten web sites, served at URIs with
different domain owners.

> We're talking here about the specific
> InfEnt, presumably authored by the owner of the 'example' domain,
> let's call him Raphael Sabbatini.

The same considerations should apply to the generic and specific
information entities. If Bishop is dc:creator of one, then she is of
the other. If Sabbatini is dc:creator of the other, then he's creator
of the other.

One of my gripes about the received TAG webarch is this attempt to say
that representations are not documents. I think that's ridiculous.
Sure, maybe they're "just the bits" - but that doesn't mean they can't
have authors and subjects and so on. To support this point I suggest
thinking about copyright infringement. Making a copy of a
representation invokes copyright law to exactly the same degree as
making a copy of a document. To a judge there is no distinction.

> But (still trying to catch up), doesn't this mean the whole example is
> confused/misleading?  Because if Raphael Sabbatini is the author of
> that specific InfEnt, and it's the only authorised representation for
> http://example/hen, then he's the creator of the generic InfEnt which
> generalises that representation!  But he isn't, Elisabeth Bishop is!
> What's wrong with this picture?
>
> A further (only maybe related) point:  You say
>
>  [that dc:title triple] is predictive: It tells someone that if they
>  dereference that URI, they will get something with that dc:title
>
> which I interpret to mean that there will be a way to verify that
> triple by reference to the retrieved representation.

No. Truth and verifiability are not the same. The statement can tell
you that a representation has a particular dc:title, and this can be
false, or it can be true without being checkable. Or it can be a
matter of judgment.

> But how
> (assuming you intend that representation to look something like what
> is currently served at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/trouv-e/, which
> contains nothing _in the HTML itself_, per the semantics of HTML,
> which provides such a verification)?  Indeed, what would it _mean_ for
> the HTML to do so (leaving aside some RDFa which actually duplicated
> the above triple)?

Not sure why to draw the boundary of admissible inference in that
particular place - you allow the semantics of HTML, but not general
knowledge of American literature. To me it's all background context,
and I admit both, because that's what we do when we engage in civil
discourse. As you say there's no way to step out of context.

Jonathan

> Now, at this point _I_ might be tempted to go the next step and say
> that a human being looking at the _presentation_ which HTML mandates
> for that representation conveys the information that Trouvee is the
> title :-).
>
> ht
> --
>       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 17:32:57 UTC