- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 16:32:28 -0700
- To: www-tag <www-tag@w3.org>
TimBL is worried that Roy's view of what a Resource is (explained by Roy in this list rather nicely) compromises RDF's ability to do its job. The more I think about this, the more I'm having trouble seeing what the problem is. In RDF, I can assert that the resource http://example.com/23ru30u2 has a property named "Title" whose value is "Lorem ipsum". It may be the case that an HTML representation of that resource has a TITLE element whose content is "Lorem ipsum", while in an equivalent XML representation there is a <example:title> element whose content is "Lorem ipsum". Or maybe not. If I believe that RDF assertion, I probably believe it despite what any (potentially ephemeral) representation may say. I don't see that it makes any difference whether the resource is effectively just an HTML document or whether it's something less concrete, such as "Weather forecast for Oaxaca" or "The black Toyota Dan's trying to sell". My own view of what a resource is may be found in http://www.textuality.com/tag/s1.1.html Where is the problem for RDF? What am I missing? I think there is another issue lurking in here that may deserve calling out: given a URI, while you can potentially retrieve a representation of the resource, you can't find out what the resource is. There is no systematic way to look at http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/MXOA0069.html and realize that the resource is really "Yahoo's weather forecast for Oaxaca". In fact, this is why we need RDF or equivalent - to provide a standardized way to make assertions about resources, something lacking in the basic web architecture, which only knows about representations. -Tim
Received on Tuesday, 16 July 2002 19:32:26 UTC