Re: Information resources

Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2007-11 -25, at 16:40, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:
> 
>>
>>>> Of course, I am assuming,
>>>>
>>>> awww:InformationResource owl:disjointWith awww:NonInformationResource.
>>>
>>> The AWWW does not talk about Non-information resources.
>>> You would have to define it is you wanted to use it in conversation.
>> Clearly, Pat is not an Information Resource.  AWWW doesn't not talk 
>> about Pat. Neither about genes, molecule, cars, hard copy books, etc., 
>> etc., how useful will the web be then?
>>
>> My point of view is: AWWW only delivers information in documents. Any 
>> information about anything will do.
>>>> Because if it is not true, i.e., there is something that can be 
>>>> either IR or non-IR, then the definition of IR seems already 
>>>> irrelevant (at least if we don't find another 30x code for that 
>>>> mixed category with regard to httpRange-14).
>>>>
>>>> As everything in the web is a rdfs:Resource, either (1) or (2) seems 
>>>> running into a paradox.  (I am not a logician.  If I am wrong, 
>>>> please point it out for me.)
>>>
>>> 1 is false.
>>> 2 is not defined in the awww.
>> Will (2) ever be defined in the AWWW?
> 
> Non-information resource is your term.  You introduced it.  You haven't 
> explained why you need it.
> You haven't explained how it is part of the argument.

How about - simply say whatever is in the class that's disjoint with 
your awww:InformationResource (already suggested above). The only 
additional definition then is the "non-". This remains agnostic about 
whether *all* things fall into one or the other of these classes.

But why have such a class in this discussion, you ask?

One of the ways we can be clearer about RDF/OWL class definitions, is by 
being clear about which things are *not* in some class we define (and 
ideally also giving some explanation). For example, considering "books", 
which of the layers of the FRBR conceptualisation (work, expression, 
manifestation, copy) are information resources in the AWWW sense, and 
which aren't.  "Books" are slippery things, and have been ontologised in 
various ways. FRBR being just one -
eg see http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september02/hickey/09hickey.html
http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/wgfrbr/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRBR
RDFized: http://vocab.org/frbr/core http://vocab.org/frbr/extended

RDF terms are also slippery things, but at least they're a W3C creation, 
so getting an account of whether RDF terms are "information resources" 
should be a smaller task. I'm yet to hear a knock-down argument as to 
why RDF terms (dc:creator, foaf:OnlineAccount etc) are not human works 
with http-accessible representations, just like Web pages and books. I 
don't really mind putting in the 303 redirects, but I still haven't come 
to any clear rule-based or intuition-based sense of what things are in 
or out of the awww:InformationResource class. A lot of the http-range 
discussion has been in terms of people, cars, etc; RDF properties are 
much closer to the borderline, and so might be a useful category of 
thing to help make these definitions sharper.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Monday, 26 November 2007 10:50:59 UTC