information resources [was: Draft minutes...]

On Oct 7, 2004, at 10:10 AM, <Patrick.Stickler@nokia.com> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> One comments on the minutes of your meeting.
>
> DanC suggests:
>
> [
> Dan: One difference occured to me, if you can get hold of the
> resource itself for commercial purposes can the resource be
> duplicated, or consumed, bu looking at it so therefore a movie,
> donloaded anfd not paid for is an info resource while the table
> is not because looking at the table did not consume it
> ]
>
> Firstly: would it be fair to recast this as "an information
> resource is any resource that might fall within the scope
> of copyright law"?

Close...

That's a relevant subset of information resource, but, for example,
a list of the 1st 200 prime numbers is an information resource
but isn't copyrightable, AFAIK.

>  That sounds like a useful criteria for
> determining (potential/probable) membership in the class
> of "information resources" -- though this could (should)
> simply be captured in an RDF schema that folks can use to
> classify their resources as they see fit.

It's captured in a few RDF schemas; for example

http://www.cyc.com/2004/06/04/cyc#AbstractInformationalThing
(the hypertext docs are also useful
http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/info- 
vocab.html#AbstractInformationalThing )

I've done a little work on an RDF schema using the terms in the webarch
document (http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/fdesc54/ ) but I haven't touched it
in a while and the TAG hasn't discussed it in a while. Thanks for the  
prod;
maybe I'll put some effort there. Dunno...

> Secondly: I don't think the issue has ever been that folks are
> particularly confused about what TimBL means by "information resource",
> but rather whether the set of web-accessible resources should be
> constrained to be equivalent to the set of "information resources"
> per TimBLs definition. The above test helps to clarify the
> nature of the membership of "information resources" (per TimBLs
> definition) but does not address the question of whether that class
> should be equivalent to the class of web-accessible resources.

equivalent... do you mean subset? I haven't heard anybody
argue that all information resources are web-accessible.

But yes... the discussion of the issue often involves re-iterated claims
that HTTP-gettable resource is a subset of information resource
that are not found to be satisfying/convincing to other TAG members.

-- 
Dan

Received on Thursday, 7 October 2004 14:15:42 UTC