Re: Request for Review of TAG AWWW 2nd LC Draft.

At Pats request I am fowarding the content of a message I received from 
him in response to my request that he review our 2nd LC WD.

Best regards

Stuart
--
----Original Message-----
From: Pat Hayes [mailto:phayes@ihmc.us]
Sent: 28 September 2004 21:50
To: Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)
Subject: Re: Request for Review of TAG AWWW 2nd LC Draft.

Stuart, greetings and apologies for the lateness of this reply. (I could 
plead mitigating circumstances, but I was already late when Ivan came.)  
I know time is tight and I have no right to hold things up any longer.  
Although I am still not entirely happy,  for W3C procedural purposes you 
may register my acceptance of this as an adequate response to my 
original objection.  Stop reading at this point if you like.

The document is greatly improved and I can now understand it coherently, 
and I appreciate the work that must have gone into getting it into this 
state. However, it is still ambiguous in a few places, most notably in 
sections 2.2 (which is blatantly circular and misuses terminology in 
confusing ways) . In particular, the sections you cite in your message 
seem to indicate that you intend the unqualified use of the word 
'resource' to be the wide sense (my 'D' in the C/D contrast, i.e. 
anything that may be referred to), whereas the bulk of the text in the 
document seems to imply rather clearly that you have in mind the 
narrower C sense, in particular where the text remarks or presumes 
without explicit comment that resources have states and can be accessed 
by Web protocols.  Section 2.2.3 seems to be a sketch/draft of a way to 
resolve this tension quite nicely, but the idea is not developed.

The central example has been re-worded very nicely to make its meaning 
clear (the resource is the on-line weather report) but it is still not 
clear if the analogous alternative example, where the resource would be 
the actual weather, would be a valid example: certainly the quote from 
section 2.2 seems to suggest this; but much of the rest of the 
discussion in the text seems inconsistent with it.

The remark that this document is not intended to cover all SWeb uses is 
very helpful, and I think was a wise insertion, and the clarification of 
the meaning of 'representation' is good.

Rather than produce another vast email, I have annotated the text with 
comments drawing attention to the places where this ambiguity seems to 
still arise, and making a few other comments, most of them reiterations 
of points I made when commenting on the earlier draft. The result is at

 http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes/2004-PatHayesComments.html

in case it might be useful.

Pat

A few editorial matters you might want to check:

In Sec 2.3 'URI' is used as a plural, elsewhere 'URIs' is used.

Section 2.6 talks of 'some view on representations' What does this mean?

Section 3.3.1, second paragraph seems to have some elision at the end 
(may be only a missing period)

Is an interaction unsafe if the agent is AT RISK of incurring an 
obligation, or only in the case where the obligation is in fact 
incurred? The glossary implies the latter but I think the former is 
intended.


> Pat,
>
> The TAG has been working to address some of the concerns that you 
> raised in
> [1] in response to our 1st last call on the the AWWW document [2].
>
> In particular, we now explicitly state that "We do not limit the scope of
> what might be a resource", and we introduce a term for the class of
> resources that can be interacted with via an exchange of 
> representations -
> "information resources". This is an attempt to resolve the 'C'/'D' sense
> ambiguities in the use of terms that you identify.
>
> A couple of extracts from the now 2nd LC draft [2] below.
>
> We would appreciate your review of this draft and an indication of 
> whether
> you feel we have addressed the comments you made in [1].
>
> Best regards
>
> Stuart Williams
> On Behalf of W3C TAG
> -- 
> [1]
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webarch-comments/2004JanMar/1057. 
>
> html
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-webarch-20031209/
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-webarch-20040816/
>
> "2.2. URI/Resource Relationships
>
> By design a URI identifies one resource. We do not limit the scope of 
> what
> might be a resource. The term "resource" is used in a general sense for
> whatever might be identified by a URI. A significant class of resources,
> information resources, are discussed in Information Resources and
> Representations [section 3.1]."
>
> and
> "3.1. Information Resources and Representations
> The term Information Resource refers to resources that convey 
> information.
> Any resource that has a representation is an information resource. A
> representation consists logically of two parts: data (expressed in one or
> more formats used separately or in combination) and metadata (such as the
> Internet media type of the data)."



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Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2004 09:45:29 UTC