Re: The "web page" is the car

On Wednesday, Jan 29, 2003, at 12:17 US/Eastern, Mark Baker wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 10:43:07PM -0800, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>> To go back to the car example, if I define a URI scheme "vin" that
>> matches the manufacturer's vehicle identification number standard
>> and then deploy a resolution mechanism for "vin" using the WWW
>> interface, the GET vin:289814678... will consistently result in
>> representations of cars that are always in the form of conceptual
>> works, because that is what the WWW interface provides in response to
>> GET on any URI.  Yet it would be completely unreasonable for the
>> Semantic Web to claim that "vin" URIs identify the conceptual work
>> and not the car, right?
>
> Are you two in synch about what a "conceptual work" is here?  I'm not
> so sure.  From the above, it appears that Roy believe it's the
> bag-o-bits representation about the car, while I think that Tim
> defines it to be something like "an information object about the car".
>
> As I said in my previous message, I believe those two models to be
> equivalent, though it also suggests to me that the "conceptual work"
> model is unnecessarily confusing, which can itself cause problems.
>
> For example, Tim writes;
>
> "If a web page is about a car, then the URI can't be used to refer to 
> the web page."
>  -- http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/HTTP-URI.html#L728
>
> Which I believe to be incorrect, because (assuming that "web page" is
> the conceptual work, and not the bag-o-bits .. oh, the agony of
> nomenclature) there is only one thing; the conceptual work *is* the 
> car.
>

No. They were created on different dates - for example.
The conceptual work people loosely call a web page is very real.
Its not a mystifying concept. Its what people actually refer to.
Kids are taught to be critical of it, ask who wrote it and what
their incentives are.   ("Conceptual work" is a cyc name in the cyc
public ontology, by the way - that's where I got it from.)
But the concept is actually common for anyone who uses the web.


> MB
> -- 
> Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca
> Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis

Received on Wednesday, 29 January 2003 19:29:26 UTC