Re: Revisiting namespaceDocument-8

Henry S. Thompson wrote:
> I don't (yet) find "exhaustably expressible in a message" a very
> useful test -- consider e.g. the number three -- I'm pretty sure I
> could give a pretty thorough expression of what 'three' is all about
> in a message. . .

Not to pick nits but it's not necessarily extremely clear from WebArch 
what a message is. The closest I could find is at the beginning of 
section 3:

"""
A message may include data as well as metadata about a resource (...), 
the message data, and the message itself (...). A message may even 
include metadata about the message metadata (for message-integrity 
checks, for instance).
"""

That's a whole lot of "may"s. Furthermore, there's a glossary definition:

"""
Message
   A unit of communication between agents.
"""

Not exactly constraining. The way I read it if I come up with PTP (Pizza 
Transfer Protocol) in which I connect to a server and send it the 
following message:

GETME pizza!
With: anchovies, cheese
Speed: quick
Hunger: high

I then close the connection. Ten minutes later, a pizza is delivered to 
my door. According to my reading of WebArch, I am now about to feed on 
an information resource.

I'm not asking that WebArch handle such cases gracefully, but I would 
like to point out that trying to come up with a precise definition of an 
information resource based on a fuzzy definition of message is unlikely 
to get us very far.

I'm personally happy with Norm's "grey area" thing, and I don't have use 
cases that require it to be further defined. I get the feeling we could 
spend quite some time figuring out if one can bath twice in the same 
river and how far in or out of the Cavern does an information resource 
turn into a pumpkin, and that's something that's been done before with 
very limited success to date.

And what I like about this fuzziness is that "a namespace" is a fuzzy 
notion as well. I'm in perfect bliss with the idea that a namespace is 
an information resource if when I dereference it I get a 200 with 
something useful because whoever owns it put an information resource 
there, and not an information resource if the above doesn't work out. 
That namespaces would then fall into categories is not something I see 
as an issue, in fact it's a feature that could perhaps become handy in 
the future (eg. "namespaces should be information resources when <insert 
smart TAG finding here> and shouldn't otherwise").

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Senior Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/

Received on Thursday, 30 June 2005 01:21:00 UTC