- From: Andy Seaborne <andy.seaborne@epimorphics.com>
- Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 13:10:49 +0000
- To: public-rdf-wg@w3.org
>> 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. Unconvinced. What's an RDFa document? It's some RDF, some scripts, some HTML links, some appearance. Is that limiting it to RDF? I think that all that matters is observation, what it returns on dereference when asking for RDF. What the thing "is" does not matter; only partially observations are possible. We can't hope that observation A and observation B are in anyway consistent (they happen at different times) unless something says so explicitly (HTTP header or claim by publisher). And a resource may be observable as RDF one moment and not the next. log:semantics is a web-at-an-instance predicate and makes an observation. That's OK for one rules run. It is somewhat problematic when passing on information to another party if that's all that's passed on. Andy
Received on Thursday, 15 December 2011 13:11:19 UTC