- From: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
- Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2002 18:19:07 -0800
- To: WWW-Tag <www-tag@w3.org>
There'll be lots more but this one jumped out at me. In section 2.2.3 there is a list of ways in which ambiguities in URI/resource relationships can crop up. One important one that we spent a lot of time talking about got left out, and should be there as item 4 in the list: Consider Herman Melville's "Moby Dick". A URI might refer to a particular printing of this work (say by ISBN), or to the work itself in an abstract sense (for example, using RDF), or to the fictional white whale, or to a particular copy of the book on the shelves of a library (via the library's online catalogue web interface), or to the record in the library's electronic catalogue which contains the metadata about the work, or to the Gutenberg project's online version (currently at http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext01/moby10b.txt). These are all quite distinct resources, and saying that the resource is "Moby Dick" doesn't help. The author and users of a URI need clear shared understandings of what the resource being identified is. [I see that Moby Diick crops up in a later note, but this is the context that the white whale arose in or previous discussions.] -Tim
Received on Saturday, 9 November 2002 21:19:08 UTC