Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

Tim, greetings.

On 2012 Mar 25, at 17:35, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:

> (Not useful to  talk about NIRs.  The web architecture does not. Now does Jonathan's baseline, not HTTP Range-14.  Never assume that what an IR is about is not itself a IR.)

Well, httpRange-14 sort of does talk about 'non-information resources', by necessary implication.  If the set of information resources (IR) is not the same as the set of all resources (R), then the set R\IR (which in any case exists) is non-null, and might as well be called the set of 'non-information-resources' as anything else.  But perhaps R\IR is a better notation. (I don't intend this to be hair-splitting)

Parenthetically, what _is_ IR?  Referring to Rees's editors draft [1], [issue-14-resolved] effectively says that iff a resource X is 200-retrieved, then it must _always_ be assigned to the set IR (the resolution seems to effectively define 'being 200-retrievable' as the definition of 'information resource', and this is consistent with [1] section 1.1 which says "One convention[...] was for a hashless URI to refer to the document-like entity ("information resource") served at that URI").

So my phrasing was intended to weaken [issue-14-resolved] to suggest that X being 200-retrievable puts X in IR, _only_ if the documentation about X (retrieved by conneg on X, say) does not put it in R\IR.

How something is put into R\IR is a separate issue.  Perhaps there's a need for a class std:RnotIR, or perhaps this is up to the client, who may decide that discovering that 'X a foaf:Person' is enough to put it in R\IR for the client's purposes.

----
Example:

So, if X=http://example.org/cedric 200-returns

    <> foaf:name "Cedric".

then X is in IR, and oddly enough has a name (the domain of foaf:name isn't restricted to foaf:Person).  If it 200-returns

    <> foaf:name "Cedric"; 
        a foaf:Person.

then the client should deem X to be in R\IR.
----

This does mean that the RDF description document which has been retrieved from the URI X doesn't have a name at this point.  But if that matters to the owner of X (perhaps because they want to refer to how the description document is licensed), then this minority (?) situation can be managed by having retrieval of X produce

    <> a foaf:Person; 
        eg:describedBy <http://example.org/cedric-description>.
    <http://example.org/cedric-description> eg:licensed <cc-by>.

That places X in R\IR, and indicates a description document about which anything one wishes can be asserted.

All the best,

Norman


[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/uddp-20120229/

-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

Received on Sunday, 25 March 2012 18:07:31 UTC