- From: Noah Mendelsohn <nrm@arcanedomain.com>
- Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:59:05 -0400
- To: nathan@webr3.org
- CC: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>, www-tag@w3.org, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
Sorry, reference one was intended to be to the definition of IR in WebArch [1]. The quote I refer to is: "By design a URI identifies one resource. We do not limit the scope of what might be a resource. The term "resource" is used in a general sense for whatever might be identified by a URI. It is conventional on the hypertext Web to describe Web pages, images, product catalogs, etc. as “resources”. The distinguishing characteristic of these resources is that all of their essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message. We identify this set as “information resources.” This document is an example of an information resource. It consists of words and punctuation symbols and graphics and other artifacts that can be encoded, with varying degrees of fidelity, into a sequence of bits. There is nothing about the essential information content of this document that cannot in principle be transfered in a message. In the case of this document, the message payload is the representation of this document." Yes, this definition is troublingly vague around the edges and in some of its terminology, but the example in the 2nd paragraph makes pretty clear what's mostly intended. There is no reference here to any particular retrieval protocol being provided; the example rests on the fact that the words, punctuation symbols, etc. that form the document can be encoded into bits and transmitted in a message, should you wish to do so. Same as with the text of the Declaration of Independence. We compare that with a URI that identifies something more tangible, like my pet dog, which can't meaningfully be "encoded into a sequence of bits". Noah [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-benefits On 10/21/2011 10:50 AM, Noah Mendelsohn wrote: > > > On 10/21/2011 8:28 AM, Nathan wrote: >> The only potential clarity I have on the issue, and why I've clipped above, >> is that I feel the /only/ property that distinguishes an "IR" from anything >> else in the universe, is that it has a [transfer/transport]-protocol as a >> property of it. > > Really? Let's imagine something that's pretty clearly a document, e.g. the > text of the US Declaration of Independence. Let's say someone, for whatever > good or bad reason, decides to mint a URN to identify it. I would claim: > > * It's clearly within the scope of what was intended by an IR. I was > careful to say that the resource in question is the text of the > declaration, that text can easily be conveyed in a message using an > encoding like ASCII, unicode, etc. > > * There is not necessarily a transfer/transport protocol associated with > it, and if there were, the choice of protocol(s) might evolve over decades > or centuries. > > The distinguishing characteristic of an IR is that it is ammenable to > (having it's "essence" [1]) conveyed in a message. It is not required that > the means of doing so are spelled out in advance, stable over time, or in > fact ever realized in practice. The declaration is an IR, IMO, whether or > not we choose to deploy it using HTTP at a given time. And...because it is > an IR, status code 200 is appropriate should we at any point wish to use HTTP. > > I think the distinction is important. > > Noah
Received on Friday, 21 October 2011 14:59:34 UTC