Re: [Fwd: RE: "information resource"]

On Thursday, October 14, 2004, 9:51:39 PM, noah wrote:

nuic> Perhaps it's worth noting that our current editors draft says [1]

nuic> TRUE per Basel Definition:  "The distinguishing
nuic> characteristic of these [information] resources is that 
nuic> all of their essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message."

nuic> but it does NOT say the converse:

nuic> FALSE per Basel Definition: "A non-information resource is distinguished
nuic> by the fact that none of its state can be conveyed in a message."

Yes, exactly. And that is good and I am comfortable with it.

nuic> We shouldn't be surprised that there is some machine-representable state
nuic> for a real live shaggy dog.


I'm not. But (see earlier threads on testability) saying that an IR is
any resource for which there exists any information whatsoever is
equivalent to saying IR == resource, thus making it a useless and
meaningless term.

nuic>   We might choose to expose its temperature or
nuic> its weight, for example.  The distinction drawn in Basel is that dogs are
nuic> interestingly different from information resources because there exist
nuic> essential aspects of the dog that are not conveyable in a machine-readable
nuic> way.

Yes and this was a distinction that I was happy to see made, and stopped
opposing the term IR because it was now both useful and testable.

nuic> Noah

nuic> [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/webarch/#id-resources (I don't think I have
nuic> a stable link in date space for this, unfortunately)

nuic> --------------------------------------
nuic> Noah Mendelsohn 
nuic> IBM Corporation
nuic> One Rogers Street
nuic> Cambridge, MA 02142
nuic> 1-617-693-4036
nuic> --------------------------------------







-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
 Member, W3C Technical Architecture Group

Received on Thursday, 14 October 2004 23:24:48 UTC