Re: Information resources?

> Let's say that, instead, the response comes back as
> 
>     HTTP/1.1 200 OK
>     content-type: application/uri
> 
>     urn:integer:1
> 
> (and someone actually bothered to register those things) where the
> media type is defined to mean "that which is identified by the enclosed
> URI".  What then?  Is that not capable of representing *everything* we
> know and mean by the abstract concept of 1?

That's a great thought experiment....    Wow.

What would be a good representation of rdf:type (or any other RDF
property or class) ?      This experiment proves there could be one,
but what would be useful and architecturally consistent?

> And the only reason this argument has persisted for so long is
> because people insist on framing it as something "new" that only
> affects the semantic web, and using obscure examples of dogs and
> cars.

I don't think dogs and cars are obscure.  It's hard to work with RDF
for a day without having URIs for people, organizations, books,
conferences, etc, ... and being stuck with the very real problem of
distinguishing between those things and web pages about those things.

I don't know if you haven't tried it, or when you tried it somehow it
all worked out for you.   I'd be *very* interested in how you got it
to all work out, if you did.   In particular, what URIs did you use
for people (etc), and what was the web behavior around those URIs?

If this question makes you upset with RDF, ..., I'm sorry.   RDF, like
a lot of things, sucks and is also the best we've got.

> If you simply take the same example and apply it to "my home page",
> wherein the page actually consists of multiple representations
> that are independently authored and may or may not be provided
> depending on the requesting user agent, then you can use the same
> invalid dc properties to make contradictory assertions about
> "my home page" that you would for a "car" or "picture of the car",
> or for anything else for that matter.  This is not the fault of
> the person who had the nerve to place "my home page" on the Web:
> it is the fault of using ambiguously targeted assertions within
> a language that assumes properties are unambiguous.

It's *not* just a pathological cases that we're stuck on -- we can't
get the good cases to work right!   (Not unless we use notions like in
my proposed text on Information Resources and Representations.   If we
forbid "200 OK" responses from non-Information Resources, we're okay.)

     -- sandro

Received on Thursday, 9 September 2004 14:59:43 UTC