- From: Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) <dbooth@hp.com>
- Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 23:49:57 -0400
- To: "Jonathan Rees" <jonathan.rees@gmail.com>, "Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)" <skw@hp.com>
- Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>, "Rhys Lewis" <rhys@volantis.com>
Jonathan, Great comments! One little note: > From: Jonathan Rees > . . . > "Information resources" - the definition in terms of "essential > characteristics" is useless, since it is neither objective, accurate, > or precise. We don't need a rigorous definition, just one that helps > us to distinguish IR's from non-IR's most of the time, and perhaps to > answer the question of when distinct URI's denote the same IR. Several > alternative definitions have been proposed, such as John Cowan's "a > resource that we are willing to identify with its representations" and > David Booth's "a networked source of representations". (See > http://wiki.neurocommons.org/InformationResource .) The requirement > for a definition should be admitted first; the actual definition > itself is less important. > . . . . FWIW, I've slightly updated my proposed definition of information resource to include the word "sink": http://dbooth.org/2006/identity/#propdefir [[ a network source/sink of representations ]] because some information resources are more about consuming information than producing information. For example, consider a confessional site that allows you to submit your confession, but the only "representation" it ever gives out -- with an HTTP 200 Okay status code of course -- is "Thank you. You are absolved." David Booth, Ph.D. HP Software +1 617 629 8881 office | dbooth@hp.com http://www.hp.com/go/software
Received on Friday, 1 June 2007 03:51:01 UTC