Re: resources, stuffs and individuation

On Wed, 2003-04-23 at 19:13, pat hayes wrote:
> >>... so how about "a resource is anything that can be referred to".
> >
> >It is synonymous with "a resource is anything that can be identified",
> 
> That wasn't my intent. One may be able to refer without identifying, 
> which was part of the point. Also, I know what 'refer' means much 
> better than I know what 'identify' means. It carries less baggage.

How can you 'refer' to something if you have no way of talking about
things outside your knowledge other than by a URI? I assume that to
'refer' to something requires some kind of language for doing so?
RFC 2396 and URIs have to work and be useful regardless of whether or
not some specific system can 'refer' to things via some other mechanism.

I think its useful to point out again that URIs have to work for all
past, present and future systems. That includes things that you would
consider 'on the web', and ones you wouldn't. (My definition of the web
is the set of all RFC-2396-Resources but that's not a common definition
these days). That includes the Semantic Web as well as LDAP, Web
Services as well as VOIP, sip, pop, tip, telnet, etc.

That means that URIs have to work even in the case where two systems
have lethally incompatible models of reality. To me that means that
RFC2396bis should say as little as possible. Concepts such as 'refer'
don't belong in there at all.....

-MM

Received on Wednesday, 23 April 2003 19:35:49 UTC