Re: erratum Re: resources and URIs

Hi Pat,

> But in any case, if this really is what the URI<->resource connection 
> is supposed to mean, this ought to be clearly and unambiguously 
> spelled out in the TAG architecture description.

I hope your continued persistence will drive this discussion to such a
profitable conclusion, so that we may speak of URIs and resources with
confidence that we have some shared interpretation of the terms :)

Just thinking out loud, on your recent examples:

The web is a system for retrieving representations from and transmitting
representations to things addressed by URI, and those things are called
resources. The web does not depend on what resources actually *are*, which
leads to the discussions over whether the resource is the weather, or the
document describing the weather.

To continue your postman example, the postal system is the web, the
mailing address is the URI, and the thing that sends/receives letters is
the resource. The resource could be a person, or a company, or something
even more virtual, but its precise nature does not matter much to the
postal system. Could you describe the architecture of the postal system
without in fact describing the nature of senders/receivers at all?

However the semantic web appears to be concerned more with reasoning about 
the nature of senders and receivers, rather than simply delivery, and I 
think that is not something that can just be slipped into the existing web 
architecture casually.

Michael

-- 
YesLogic Prince prints XML!
http://yeslogic.com

Received on Tuesday, 22 July 2003 00:11:54 UTC