Re: Terminology proposal

your proposal sounds good.
I would augment the definition with an explicit mentioning of the 
distinction of information resource vs. non-information resource to 
refer to the abstract notion of a movie or the binary encoding.

Pierre-Antoine Champin wrote:
> Following Sylvia's answer to the question about our terminology, I
> propose that :
>
> we replace the 3 definitions of media entity, resource and
> representation by a single definition of 'media resource', that would
> look like:
>
>   Media Resource: any Resource (as defined by [URI]) related to a
>   media content. Note that [URI] points out that a resource may be
>   retrievable or not. Hence, this term encompasses the abstract notion
>   of a movie (e.g. Notting Hill) as well as the binary encoding of this
>   movie (e.g. the MPEG-4 encoding of Notting Hill on my DVD), or any
>   intermediate levels of abstraction (e.g. the director's cut or the
>   plane version of Notting Hill). Although some ontologies (FRBR, BBC)
>   define concepts for different such levels of abstraction, our ontology
>   does not commit to any classification of media resources.
>
> I think the benefits are the following:
>
> 1) we drop the controversial term 'entity'
> 2) we are compatible with MFWG (who refer to [URI] as well)
> 3) we acknowledge the fact that there are several levels of abstraction,
> but at the same time...
> 4) we are consistent with our decision not to formalize them (w.r.t.
> that, 'resource' vs. 'representation' was such a formalization, though
> minimal)
>
> I recall below the definition of 'resource' from [URI]. Note that they
> use (without defining it, though), the term 'entity', which is somewhat
> more "concrete" than 'resource'. I believe that this definition provides
> the generality that we are seeking with 'entity', and I guess the more
> restrictive meaning that we gave to 'resource' in the current definition
> is what makes Sylvia think it is incompatible with the definition below.
>
>   pa
>
>
> from [URI] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2396.html :
>
>       Resource
>          A resource can be anything that has identity.  Familiar
>          examples include an electronic document, an image, a service
>          (e.g., "today's weather report for Los Angeles"), and a
>          collection of other resources.  Not all resources are network
>          "retrievable"; e.g., human beings, corporations, and bound
>          books in a library can also be considered resources.
>
>          The resource is the conceptual mapping to an entity or set of
>          entities, not necessarily the entity which corresponds to that
>          mapping at any particular instance in time.  Thus, a resource
>          can remain constant even when its content---the entities to
>          which it currently corresponds---changes over time, provided
>          that the conceptual mapping is not changed in the process
>
>
>
>
>   

-- 
_________________________________________________
Dipl.-Inf. Univ. Tobias Bürger

STI Innsbruck
University of Innsbruck, Austria
http://www.sti-innsbruck.at/ 

tobias.buerger@sti2.at
__________________________________________________

Received on Tuesday, 26 May 2009 13:31:04 UTC