Re: On, and on, and on...

At 12:16 PM 6/8/00 -0500, you wrote:
>But I'm not sure I understand the position of many other
>participants in this list; I continue to see
>misunderstandings of the essential specs, such as the
>distinction between resources and entities[1], and
>I find it worthwhile to (try to) clear these up[2] and
>understand the arguments better.
>
>
>[1] Graham Klyne's message of Thu, 08 Jun 2000 09:05:56 +0100
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-uri/2000Jun/0362.html

That was a slip on my part, which unfortunately seems to have obscured the 
point I wished to pursue.

I'll re-phrase my comment:

Ignoring, for now, issues of relative and context-dependent URIs.  If a
namespace is a resource, and a namespace name is a URI:  what resource is
identified by that URI?  Logically, it is the namespace (which may be an
abstract, non-retrievable entity).  But if one chooses a namespace name
that can also be used (directly) to retrieve some schema bound to the
namespace, then the resource identified by the URI ipso facto is the
resource represented by the schema document thus retrieved.

It seems to me that this resource represented by the schema document must, 
in general, be different than the namespace resource;  in RDF terms, I can 
make statements about it (who created it, etc.) that are not statements 
about the namespace.

Where now the 1:1 correspondence between URIs and resources?

...

Another view, contemplating the quote you shot back at me:

       "Resource
          A resource can be anything that has identity.  Familiar
          examples include an electronic document, an image, a service
          (e.g., "today's weather report for Los Angeles"), and a
          collection of other resources.  Not all resources are network
          "retrievable"; e.g., human beings, corporations, and bound
          books in a library can also be considered resources.
          The resource is the conceptual mapping to an entity or set of
          entities, not necessarily the entity which corresponds to that
          mapping at any particular instance in time.  Thus, a resource
          can remain constant even when its content---the entities to
          which it currently corresponds---changes over time, provided
          that the conceptual mapping is not changed in the process."

         -- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

This admits an electronic document as a resource, of which a schema 
document is an example.  Then what one gets doing a GET on its URI is an 
entity containing a representation of that schema document.

...

Or, treating the resource as the conceptual mapping from URI to entity, I 
perceive two such:
Schema as resource:
  - the mapping to a document created to describe some properties of some data
Namespace as resource:
  - the mapping to a definition of properties associated with the namespace 
(of which a schema may be a part).

...

What does it mean, in terms of the conceptual mapping involved, to say that 
a namespace is a resource?

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
(GK@ACM.ORG)

Received on Friday, 9 June 2000 04:17:23 UTC