Re: [Linking-open-data] Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and Linked Data

Pat,

You have my vote in spades!  Ahh, I smell the sweet waft of wisdom.

Now, do you care to tackle URIs v URLs and dereferencing? :)

Mike

Pat Hayes wrote:
>> Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> writes:
> 
> ...
> 
>>  > Try this for size.
> 
> ...
> 
>> That's not bad.  I don't think it gets the "old web" right, though.
> 
> Possibly not. I realize that the old Web is pretty darn complicated, 
> and admit that others (such as  Tim and Roy) have a much better grasp 
> of its intricacies than I ever want or will have. So maybe my 'http 
> endpoint' criterion is too architecturally simplistic. Nevertheless, 
> I think the spirit is clear: an information resource is some 
> computational network entity that can deliver responses to transfer 
> protocols, even if this 'entity' is distributed, virtual (like a 
> hypothetical web server that knows the abstract text of some 
> international agreement and can deliver it in any European language, 
> which is in fact a bunch of servers with a content negotiator 
> standing in front of them) and maybe other things I have never heard 
> of: still, it has to be able to somehow be suitably active in the 
> matter of moving information around the internet. As I say, for full 
> details ask someone who knows the details, probably Tim or Roy. But 
> in any case, things that aren't active in this way, aren't 
> information resources.
> 
>>  It
>> doesn't really explain the many web pages which look completely
>> different depending on your cookies or IP address.
> 
> What have web pages got to do with it, still less what they look 
> like? The representation that REST talks about in cases like this is 
> still the (single) representation of the (single) resource. If it 
> gets hacked around by your cookies on your machine, that's not the 
> Web's fault.
> 
>>  And it suggests that
>> the end-point of an HTTP request corresponds one-to-one to the URI, but
>> in fact the mapping between URIs and web server processes is
>> many-to-many.
> 
> OK, I admit I get lost in the weeds at this point. But see above.
> 
>> And it's still pretty darn complicated.    :-)
>>
>> I'd love to see a New Architecture Of the WWW, that covers old and
>> Semantic web in a few simple pages, but the old one isn't quite broken
>> enough yet to motivate its acceptance, even if we could figure it out.
> 
> Im not saying its broken at all. What is broken is getting 
> architecture muddled up with semiotics. I don't think the 
> *architecture* of the SWeb is any different from that of the Web. 
> Just admit that the description of the architecture is exactly what 
> it says it is, and leave the semantics to a different document. Then 
> we wouldn't have honest folk trying to understand the architecture 
> document using intuitions from semantics, and getting utterly 
> confused. And, we can write a Semantics of the Semantic Web which 
> will refer to the Architecture of the Web but won't get confused with 
> it.
> 
> Here's how to do it:
> 
> (1) distinguish at the get-go between reference and access.
> (2) have the architecture document talk about access and not mention 
> reference at all. Admit that its all about 'information resources' 
> and give up on this crap about resources being anything in the 
> universe.
> 
> (3) In the semantics document, point out how amazingly convenient and 
> natural it is to have a URI refer to whatever it accesses, (so we can 
> just talk about 'identifying'), but ...
> (4) ... since we are now talking about reference, and we might want 
> to use URIs to refer to inaccessible things, we need to handle this 
> somehow, which leads to the 303-redirect recommendation.
> 
> Pat
> 
> 

-- 
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Michael K. Bergman
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Received on Friday, 27 July 2007 20:40:42 UTC