Re: Principals

On 20 Nov 2012, at 23:04, Nathan <nathan@webr3.org> wrote:

> 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).

I can see that this is close, ...

 But the text is confused, as it does not distinguish the identifier, the reference
of the identifier, or the document that defines the meaning of what is identified.
I think they are using it to mean all three and so I showed how one can model this

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

> 
> 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.

yes, but they don't say that. 

The principal in my view is both something that can give you 
the URI and the referent and the document that describes it, and
a way to go from the document to the referent. Depending on the
type of principal you need to find the referent in a different way.

This is complicated - but that's what you get for being overly
general. We can clear it up here

  http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/wiki/Identity_Interoperability




> 
> Make sense?
> 

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/