Re: Principals

Henry Story wrote:
> 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?

Both, this ties in with WebID exactly.

1. principal = agent (machine agent or human agent)
2. principal identifier = a dereferencable HTTP URI which identifies a 
principal (agent).

The "represents" is just age old wording and conflation nuances, you 
could rewrite the quote to read:

   A "principal" is a distinct human or computational agent that
   initiates access to network resources.  In this protocol, a
   principal is identified by an HTTP URI, which upon dereferencing
   provides a representation of a description of the principal.

Which is loosely equivalent to what's defined in WebID 1.0.

Make sense?

Received on Tuesday, 20 November 2012 22:05:45 UTC