Re: resources and URIs

> >  > OK, then in the sense I was understanding the word "on" here, its the
> >>  *representation* which is on the network, not the thing it is a
> >>  picture of.  But I realize now that others are using 'on the Web' to
> >>  mean what I would phrase as 'referred to somewhere on the Web'. The
> >>  problem for me that is not that this is meaningless, exactly, but
> >>  that it is useless. Being 'on the Web' in this sense isn't
> >>  well-defined, cannot be checked for accuracy, provides no
> >>  architectural or semantic content.  So OK, I don't give a damn
> >>  whether something is or is not 'on' the Web in this sense, and I see
> >>  no reason why I or anyone else should give a damn what the TAG group
> >>  thinks about it either, as it makes no difference to anything.
> >
> >Pat, above you seem to use 'network' and 'Web' interchangeably;
> >is that intentional?
>
> I was being somewhat careless about the distinction, I confess. I
> assumed we we talking about the Web which is a kind of network.

Have you figured out "what kind" of network it is?  It's tempting to
say that the Web's nodes are representations and its arcs are something
composed of URIs and the method of "following" them [not sure how
to word that], but that definition lacks the mutability and indirection of
the modern Web.  How would you, then, correct the model?

>
> >If you told me there was a random bag of representations available
> >on the Web, I would't give a damn.
>
> Wouldnt that depend on what they were about? This isn't a bad
> description of quite a few blogger pages, for example.

I meant truly random, in the sense that there could be no collective
'about' about it.  My interest would severely diminish.

>
> >But if you told me there would
> >be a set of representations over time which express the state of
something
> >of interest, then I would.  How is the architecture supposed to indicate
> >that certain groups of representations (maybe over time) "hang" together
> >meaningfully?  Or is that not the job of architecture?
>
> Good question. I guess it depends on what counts as hanging together
> meaningfully.  I would say that this sounds more like a semantic
> condition than an architectural one, though to do it full justice
> would probably need both.  One way to say it might be that there is
> something which endures and which the representations accessed at a
> time are in some sense 'about' or 'of' the state of thing at that
> time, ie there is an implicit 'now' in the semantics of the
> representation that is tied to the architecturally-defined notion of
> the time of the transaction which produced the representation.

That "something which endures" ... not a "resource"?

If the representation is "of" that thing, then is it reasonable to say that
the
thing is a "source" of representations, even if it doesn't physically "emit
the bit", so to speak?

And then the final step of the composition would be

    source + time = resource


> Im
> thinking here of something like a webcam (Roy Fielding's example)
> which when pinged emits a picture out of window, it being the view
> 'then' of the 'same' scene, or the current weather in some place
> illustrated by a recent radar image.  Cases like this also fit the
> current 'single denoted resource' account very well, but I think its
> simplicity fails to do them justice, in fact.

Do you have an example of that failure?

>
> But consider another case of an exotic art site which when pinged
> chooses a random picture from some large set of sources and sends it
> back. No coherence or rationality at all: that might be the artist's
> point. But *architecturally* these seem the same to me: when pinged,
> they deliver a picture. The 'state coherence' is a semantic notion,
> even though it refers to an architecturally described time parameter.

"No coherence or rationality" is at odds with "exotic art" above.

Does 'state coherence' denote something other than 'identity'?

>
> Does this make sense, BTW? Im a lot less sure of myself when trying
> to be constructive than when emitting criticism.

I know that feeling.

--Walden

Received on Wednesday, 23 July 2003 08:38:30 UTC