RE: Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and Linked Data

John,

Even if you had *all* 500 billion (or so) representations of that object you
still would not have that object, but 500 billion representations of it.
Granted, the picture in your head about that object would be fairly
complete, but it still is a picture, not the object itself.

Regards,
Hans

-----Original Message-----
From: John Black [mailto:JohnBlack@kashori.com] 
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 12:49
To: Hans Teijgeler; Sandro Hawke
Cc: 'Linking Open Data'; SW-forum; www-tag@w3.org
Subject: Re: Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and Linked
Data

Sandro Hawke wrote:
>
> "Hans Teijgeler" <hans.teijgeler@quicknet.nl> writes:
>> To me the distinction between information and non-information 
>> resources is non-existing, because what you call a non-information 
>> resource actually contains information as well
>
> But it doesn't contain *only* information.  Information Resources are 
> things which can be entirely and completely encoded as bits and then 
> transmitted over a network.  They can be copied, perfectly.  They can 
> be serialized.  They are pure information.  (Another name I suggested 
> for this class was "Digital Artifact", but the TAG went with 
> "Information Resource" instead.)
>
> That, it seems to me, is a fairly crisp and useful class to define 
> when talking about computer systems like the Web.
>
>    -- Sandro

This is what I used to think. But, apparently, this is not the case. What
you are talking about are representations of the resource. Each
representation of the resource is "pure information" that can be perfectly
copied. But remember that the representation is not the resource. The
resource is the *source* of the representations. So while any one
representation may be copied perfectly, or even any stream of
representations over some time interval may be copied perfectly, yet these
are not the resource being represented. The resource, that which is the
source of the representations, cannot be copied. How could it? You would
have to know all future representations that resource will produce, and in
what sequence.

John
www.kashori.com


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Received on Thursday, 26 July 2007 11:04:49 UTC