RE: on documents and terms [was: RE: [WNET] new proposal WN URIs and related issues]

Ralph Swick wrote:
> The important distinction that Web Architecture makes [8]
> is that the items hereby named in our WordNet vocabulary
> are *not* themselves what the Web now calls "information
> resources" [9].
   [8] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2005Jun/0039.html
   [9] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Jul/0377.html

Pat Hayes wrote:
> My current 
> understanding is that an information resource is some thing that can 
> be transmitted over a network by a transfer protocol. On this 
> understanding, one could argue that a word was an information 
> resource.

On Thu, 20 Apr 2006 17:40:20 -0400 Booth, David wrote: 
> It sounds like you are mainly disagreeing with the TAG's guidance.

For what it's worth, I think Pat's position is consistent with
the TAG's position (i.e. the W3C's position, since webarch
is now a W3C Recommendation).

While [8] has some official status (it's a communication from
the TAG about the closure of an issue; you can get it from
the TAG issues list...) I think [9] is just a part of the
discussion. The definition of "Information Resource" that
W3C endorses is:

[[
It is conventional on the hypertext Web to describe Web pages, images, product catalogs, etc.
as ´resourcesˇ. The distinguishing characteristic of these resources is that
all of their essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message.
We identify this set as ´information resources.ˇ

This document is an example of an information resource. It consists of
words and punctuation symbols and graphics and other artifacts that can
be encoded, with varying degrees of fidelity, into a sequence of bits.
There is nothing about the essential information content of this
document that cannot in principle be transfered in a message. In the
case of this document, the message payload is the representation of this
document.
]]

http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/#def-information-resource

I don't think that means that words are not information resources.

I tried to cover this in a recent submission to IRW2006...

[[
Note that the TAG has not taken a position on whether w:InformationResource
intersects with rdf:Property.
]]
 -- "An analysis of httpRange-14" section
 http://www.w3.org/2006/04/irw65/urisym#hr14
 http://www.w3.org/2006/04/irw65/urisym


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Tuesday, 25 April 2006 23:25:08 UTC