ISSUE-5 Definition of Resource

I'd like to summarize the discussion from the WG today and ask that we 
arrive at a consensus on the meaning of terms. Here are definitions that 
align with W3C specs.

>From a web point of view, a resource is any identifiable thing. We 
identify them using URIs. 

>From an HTTP point of view, there are two kinds of resource, namely 
information resources and real-world objects. The term "real-world object" 
denotes any resource that is not an information resource. This implies 
that fictional characters are real-world objects.

An HTTP server should return a 3XX response code when a real-world object 
URI that it hosts is requested via HTTP GET. The response should redirect 
to an information resource URI that has information about the real-world 
object.

An HTTP server should return a 2XX response code when an information 
resource URI that it hosts is requested via HTTP GET. The response should 
contain a representation of the information resource in some content type, 
ideally one of the content types given by the Accept header.

For the purposes of the wg, we are interested in RDF content types.

An RDF representation consists of a set of triples which can be thought of 
as forming a graph, technically a directed, labelled graph.

The nodes in an RDF graph are labelled by RDF terms, i.e. URI, Literal, 
and Blank Node. The arcs are labelled by URIs. There are other constraints 
defined in the RDF specs.

Since we can visualize graphs as geometric objects, the term "shape" has 
been adopted to describe sets of graphs that share certain 
characteristics, e.g. those required by some application. A shape 
describes the expected contents of a graph. This includes expected arc 
labels, occurrence constraints, etc. 

The term "resource shape" is an abbreviation for the "shape of the graph 
of the RDF representation of an information resource".

_________________________________________________________
Arthur Ryman
Chief Data Officer
SWG | Rational
905.413.3077 (phone) | 416.939.5063 (cell)
IBM InterConnect 2015

Received on Thursday, 18 December 2014 20:55:56 UTC