Re: Information resources

Tim Bray wrote:

> Dan Connolly wrote:
>
>>> Other resources named by URIs may exist entirely apart from the Web.
>>
>>
>>
>> Hmm... that seems contradictory; I'd prefer to leave
>> "entirely apart from the Web" out of it...
>
>
> Actually, how about "may exist independently of the Web".  I.e. if the 
> Web goes away, so does http://www.tbray.org/misc/Tim, but the ISBN 
> doesn't, nor would the person identified by foaf#Dan.
>
>> Hmm... I thought what distinguished information resources from
>> resources in general is that only information resources have
>> representations (in the webarch sense).
>
>
> I totally disagree.  My examples include the RDF namespace and the 
> FOAF thing, both of which have representations, and in fact there are 
> systems that will take that urn:isbn: thing and give you something 
> useful.  I can't imagine anything in the universe for which you could 
> decree "there can be no representations".
>
> An  information resource is something that is primarily information. 
> That's all (I think). -Tim

And what is information ...?

In particular, why is it necessary to distinguish "information 
resources" from other kinds of resources? Are the operations available 
through the web different because a resource happens to be thought of as 
an "information resource".

If not, Occam's Razor says there is no need to make the distinction.

Vijay Saraswat
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University
(Visiting IIT Delhi, Summer 2003)
http://www.cse.psu.edu/~saraswat

Received on Monday, 28 July 2003 20:38:55 UTC