Re: Graph-State Resources (was Re: graphs and documents Re: [ALL] agenda telecon 14 Dec)

On Wed, 2011-12-14 at 21:46 +0100, Dan Brickley wrote:
> On 14 December 2011 21:31, Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> > Any ideas for a better term?
> 
> "Web Service"? "HTTPResource"? HTTPOrHTTPSMaybeGopherFTPTooResource"?
> It is a Web Service really, but the word is already rather busy with
> other duties.

None of those convey that these are things which send their state back
as RDF....

> I'm wary of suggesting that the "Resource" in "Resource Description
> Framework" now means anything more technically-specific than "Thing".
> We've spent a long time trying to clarify that.

Sorry, I'm not trying to suggest it is or should be for us -- I was just
giving a long-winded explanation of how I came to be okay with the term
Resource.

More formally, I suggest that GraphStateResource just be defined as
anything for which it's entire state can be conveyed in an RDF Graph,
with reference to REST.

> The old HTTP-NG work, which tried to wrap a distributed objects layer
> around HTTP and other browser-accessible protocols, used 'WebDocument"
> - http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-HTTP-NG-interfaces/ and nearby.
> 
> Let's call this notion 'Thingy' for purpose of the next paragraph.
> 
> If I have two physically linux boxes A and B, wired up to be part of
> the Web using round-robin DNS so that two separate hard drives / CPUs
> etc are serving up a common identical set of content, and
> http://example.com/something1 will 50% of the time serve from A, 50%
> serve from B. Lots of Web sites in practice serve using more
> sophisticated variants on this pattern.
> 
> Are we clear that in our story, there is just one "Thingy'? by virtue
> of the concept being focussed on its public name, rather than
> possibly-evolving internals. Since we know about the mechanics inside,
> we might be tempted to say there are two thingies, ... but that slips
> away from the central idealisation here. We act in the Web like we're
> talking to some unified service, which will tell us "it's state". In
> practice the details are rarely that clear.

REST is a simplification of the Web, to be sure.  It's probably about
right for these purposes.

> Anyhow, WebResource I can live with. I prefer not to use any phrase
> with "Information Resource" inside it, like "Web Accessible
> Information Resource", since it suggests we've clarified what an
> "information resource" amounts to.

None of those terms are any help for us here, trying to name a
generalization of a g-box.   We still need a term that limits it to RDF.

   -- Sandro

>   Michael Buckland's essay at
> http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/whatdoc.html does a fine
> job of showing we're in good company for not having figured all this
> out yet...
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Dan
>

Received on Wednesday, 14 December 2011 23:14:13 UTC