httpRange-14 , what's the problem

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