Re: Principals

On 11/20/12 4:49 PM, 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?
>
> 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
>    - ... ?

For you, an RDF graph. Since to me, an RDF graph is simply an entity 
relationship model [1] based graph endowed with machine readable entity 
relationship semantics :-)

The statement above outlines the mercurial unique selling point of RDF. 
At the same time, by accentuating its lineage we open up real bridges to 
other communities where the concepts we quibble about here have been 
well understood for eons.

The Web accentuates a lot of what has already existed in the broad realm 
of modern silicon based computing. That's a great thing, but we 
shouldn't lose perspective.

Links:

1.  http://bit.ly/T3kWUv -- Peter Chen's 1976 dissertation about the 
Entity Relationship Model and its applicability to the challenge of 
unified views of disparate data .

-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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