Re: Principals

On 20 Nov 2012, at 22:39, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:

> All,
> 
> More for reference purposes, since it isn't going into the WebID spec.
> 
> WebDAV Access Control Ext. Spec [1]:
> 
>      A "principal" is a distinct human or computational actor that
>      initiates access to network resources.  In this protocol, a
>      principal is an HTTP resource that represents such an actor.


you can see that this is already confused.
  1. it says a principal is a distinct human or computation actor
  2. that a principal is an http resource that represents an actor.

Which is it? The resource that represents the actor, or the actor?

In my view the terminology there is trying to get at something, but in
a pretty confused way. I tried to break that apart earlier today here:

 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webid/2012Nov/0158.html


> 
> Translation:
> 
> A data object that represents a human or computational actor (e.g. software agent). This representation is achieved as follows:
> 
> 1. data object ID is a resource URL
> 2. data object representation is an entity relationship model based description graph

What types of graphs are there?
  - description graphs
  - ... ?

> 3. the graph is comprised of attribute=value pairs that coalesce around the ID (a de-referencable URI) that denotes the entity represented by said data object.
> 
> Example:
> 
> 1. http://kingsley.idehen.net/dataspace/person/kidehen -- denotes a data object resource
> 2. http://kingsley.idehen.net/dataspace/person/kidehen#this -- denotes the real world entity that is the focal point (via attribute=value pair coalescence) for the description graph.
> 
> Linked Data use the magic of de-reference to make this very cool and neat since the URI denoting the real world entity resolves to a data object resource that represents a description of the  real world entity's description.
> 
> Links:
> 
> 1.  http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3744 -- WebDAV ACL extensions rfc
> 2. http://youtu.be/f-pJlnpkLp0 -- a favorite fun video about pointers and dereference .
> 
> -- 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kingsley Idehen	
> Founder & CEO
> OpenLink Software
> Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
> Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
> Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
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> LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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