Re: article on URIs, is this material that can be used by the SWEO IG?

>Pat Hayes scripsit:
>
>>  Those are all physical. But now suppose what you are looking at is an
>>  image of a marble bust of Julius Caesar. There is no physical
>>  connection between you and the marble, or between you and Julius.
>
>I don't see why not.  There is an electromagnetic interaction, unmediated
>by hardware, between you and the marble, which manifests as a
>visual perception of it.

Between me an the image, maybe, but not between me and the marble. 
And in any case, it is one-way. It does not give me 'access' to the 
marble, or to Julius.

>
>>  Good question. But I don't really see how the Internet community can
>>  possibly do this. First, there really isn't such a community in any
>>  real sense. Second, how can any community establish conventions for
>>  naming everything that needs to be named? Human societies have not
>>  established such conventions.
>
>What are these things which need to be named which have no names?
>The fact that something is named is evidence that it needed to be
>named.

I was speaking not of names, but of *conventions* for creating names. 
And of course I spoke too quickly as there are many such conventions: 
we all know that 'Roger' and 'Miguel' are both male names, the former 
English and the latter Spanish. But there is no *universal* 
convention for all names.

>
>>  BUt how else is one going to use the name to "access" the resource,
>>  than for there to be some kind of causal connection between them? How
>>  would I access Italy?
>
>You cannot access resources themselves.

That is not what the TAG architecture document says. It refers 
explicitly to accessing a resource, the result of which is that a 
representation is delivered in response to the access.

>  You can only access particular
>representations of those resources, chosen by content negotiation

Negotiation between what? In the case of Italy, does Italy take part 
in the content negotiation? How?

>(perhaps trivial negotiation of the form "server proposes just one
>representation, client accepts willy-nilly").

Italy is not a server.

>
>The connection between an information resource and its representation(s)
>is fairly close and straightforward.  The representation you get of
>Italy when you do a GET on an URL for Italy will have a rather more
>abstract connection to Italy.

I simply do not accept that the two uses of 'representation' have 
anything in common in these two cases. I challenge anyone who claims 
otherwise to provide an account of what "representation" means which 
will embrace both usages. For the record, I note that the TAG (and 
the REST documentation) usage of 'representation' is entirely 
different from the use of 'representation' throughout AI/KR work.

Pat Hayes

>
>--
>John Cowan   cowan@ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
>The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand
>on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.
>Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land,
>to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
>         --Thomas Henry Huxley


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Received on Saturday, 2 June 2007 21:07:10 UTC