RE: Very rough draft of TAG finding on self-describing documents

> From: Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol)
> . . .
> SelfDescription wrt to resources is also interesting... eg. for a term
> in an ontology, eg. dc:title (ie. 
> http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/title)

Yes, but as a quibble, we should be careful not to confuse the resource
with a URI that names the resource.  I cannot illustrate this well with
the dc:title URI above, because purl.org does not do 303-redirects as
required by the TAG's httpRange-14 decision (last I knew).  So instead
I'll illustrate it with a different URI.

The URI http://t-d-b.org?http://dbooth.org/2005/dbooth/ names me, David
Booth.  Since I am not an information resource according to the WebArch
definition, :) if you dereference that URI you will get a 303 See Other
response redirecting you to http://dbooth.org/2005/dbooth/ (in
accordance with the TAG's httpRange-14 decision).  Dereferencing that
second URI yields a description of me and a definition of 
http://t-d-b.org?http://dbooth.org/2005/dbooth/ as a name for me.

So for non-information resources, it is not the resource itself that is
self describing, because there is no path from the non-information
resource (me) to the information resource that describes me.  There is
only a path from my *URI* to information that describes what that URI
means.  I.e., it is the *URI* that is self-describing -- not the
resource.

David Booth

P.S. URIs Rule!   http://URIsRule.org  ;)

 

Received on Saturday, 3 March 2007 03:40:29 UTC