In other words, the membership of InformationResource is not static, it is dynamic because it is judged by use (such as http transportation).

Yes.

(and, if you’ve printed this document on physical sheets of paper, the artifact that you are holding in your hand), are resources too. They are not information resources, however, because their essence is not information.

Do you sense the irony? What you see is not Information either because it is printed on your computer screen. But yet, you still somehow can understand it and communicate with it. Ed, don’t follow it blindly and try to read it objectively?

The “Information” defined in AWWW is anything but the concept of information that we ordinarily know. Information is acquired because it is yield during processing. For instance, the water that I am now sipping is information to my body because it arose my senses and my body start to know how to handle the water. Is it information resource to you? I guess not (but you do a little now because you read this post).

Hence, nothing – I mean, nothing – can be an information by its nature. In other words, the membership of InformationResource is not static, it is dynamic because it is judged by use (such as http transportation). Hence, you cannot say that an article is an Information if you treat it as a piece of paper (even this, you still get some information, right? it is a piece of paper) but you can say it is an Information when you read it aloud.

This is why I told you, if you truely understand TimBL’s vision, you will not find any of these examples entertaining. timbl:Information is one of its kind. Nothing can be both a timbl:Information and somethingelse. Even a webpage, it can be an InformationResource but not also a webpage because one the former is always abstract the other can be physical. If you follow this line of thought, you may reach the same conclusion that I got ….

Ed, I tried to generalize the argument by asking TimBL if

rdfs:Resource is (a) awww:InformationResource and (b) [owl:complementOf awww:InforamtionResource]. You give an answer, if you cannot, do you think it is useless to pickup one instance because it only shows that non-InformationResource exist. I have never argue that. I want to know what is the necessary/sufficient condition to make something InformationResource or non-IR. Because neither TimBL nor you can sit on every web traffic to tell us right. Then, you have to develop something more concrete to guide other web users. If you cannot, then don’t judge others so hastily.

Xiaoshu

Xiaoshu

We are talking in AWWW’s belief, not yours or TimBL’s, right?

Right. http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#p43

_:Paris-the-city a [owl:complementOf awww:InformationResource].

AWWW cannot define it because it it does, it denies that “everything is an instanceOf rdfs:Resource”. See my argument with TimBL on the TAG list.

Sure, you and TimBL can make that assertion and refuse to understand those Paris’s pages – it is an open world and no one can fault you. But AWWW cannot make that assertion and you cannot fault people who develop Paris’ page.

You said the “The famous Pat Hayes page is merely self contradictory” based on the definition of InformationResource that cannot be explained. Ed, if you truly want to help TimBL, try to help him find a definition of awww:InformationResource that everyone can use objectively (I tried , really, and very hard, but I found that I can only accept it by not accepting any definition.)

It is not productive to just make a bland assertion like “Pat Hayes page is merely self contradictory” and start arguing on that ground. We are talking in AWWW’s belief, not yours or TimBL’s, right?

Xiaoshu

No, No, No. Paris is a city, not an information resource. It does not have representations.

That’s the whole point: to keep things in the “real” world separate from the web pages which talk about them.

“His idea is based on our good behavior while he cannot strip us from our the freedom of speech. The web is full of mischievous citizens like Pat Hayes and me along with other malicious one.”

The famous Pat Hayes page is merely self contradictory. What it says in the English text (that the URI denotes a particular person) contradicts what is said by giving a 200 response to a request for the URI (that it denotes an information resource – a web page). To reject this web architecture because it is possible to make self-contradictory statements would be like rejecting English because you can put up a notice saying “This is not a notice”.

“The goal of the web architecture is to make it efficient not logically right.”

Well, the 303 redirection could be argued as a reduction in efficiency in order to make things logically right. It seems like a good trade-off to me.

Ed.

By the way, Xiaoshu is my given name

Sorry, but no I don’t. I wouldn’t even know how to so insist as that sentence doesn’t make sense to me – it’s on a par with saying that I insist that 34 is yellow.

URIs don’t have representations. Some resources (information resources) do. I’m not sure that a representation has “content” – a representation is basically a media type and a sequence of bytes to be interpreted using that media type.

I don’t think I ever made any assertions about what a representation has to be “about”. What I did do was discuss some hypothetical architecture (which Ian and, perhaps, you sometimes appear to advocate) in which a URI seems to denote both a real world object (the city of Paris in our running example) and a web page about that object (different web pages for different URIs which denote the same city). In that hypothetical architecture it would seem to make some sense for the web page to have some relevance to the object; at least, that’s my assumption.

Please don’t misunderstand what I’m talking about in earlier posts in this thread. I do not advocate this hypothetical architecture – I only discussed it. I think that the architecture advocated by TimBL and co is a quite a good one (though, perhaps, not the only one possible). From now on I’m only going to discuss the TimBL architecture as I understand it.

“Consider, does “http://dublincore.org/2006/12/18/dces.rdf” says anything about itself?”

At a quick glance, no. Of course there’s no particular reason to think that it should say anything about itself. It _is_ itself, of course, which is all we ask. This is not a very onerous request.

“Of course, the best practice is to put relevant information about the resource denoted by the URI.”

No, the resource denoted by the URI _is_ the information. That’s, and I’m guessing wildly here, why it’s called an “information resource”. What it’s relevant to is a quite different matter. The resource denoted by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris is a web page (an information resource). It’s primarily about the capital of France but also references other things like the River Seine, Celts and Romans, patron saints and so on.

“The reason that I use a simple text file as the final example is to show you that no matter how you conceptualize, a URI just cannot denote too things.”

Assuming that’s a typo for “two” then I agree completely.

“We cannot make up a system to cater to people’s incorrect perception because eventually we trap ourselves into trouble.”

Absolutely.

“TimBL has great visions – and I have tremendous respect for him. But we cannot simply agree with him just because of it is what he said.”

Again, agree completely.

“With regard to this Information Resource thing, I do think he gets it wrong.”

In what way do you think he gets it wrong?

I’ve read quite a few of your posts on the TAG list, your comments above and the first part of your paper (which I can’t access at the moment to cite properly). What you seem to be criticising doesn’t match my understanding of what the AWWW and httpRange finding is about, at all.

Sometimes it looks to me that you are criticising the architecture advocated by our host here (one which is happy with wp:Paris geo:lat “48.75″). In this I agree with you completely and I’m pretty sure that TimBL would, too.

Ed.

(P.S., sorry but I want to avoid any cross-cultural blunders. Which is your given name?)

You constantly insist that the content of a URI’s representation has to be about the resource of that URI. That is not true. Or a webpage about something has to denote that thing, that is not true.

Consider, does “http://dublincore.org/2006/12/18/dces.rdf” says anything about itself? Or any 3XX end point for that matter?

Of course, the best practice is to put relevant information about the resource denoted by the URI. But AWWW cannot constrain that (Freedom of speech).

The reason that I use a simple text file as the final example is to show you that no matter how you conceptualize, a URI just cannot denote too things. We cannot make up a system to cater to people’s incorrect perception because eventually we trap ourselves into trouble.

TimBL has great visions – and I have tremendous respect for him. But we cannot simply agree with him just because of it is what he said. With regard to this Information Resource thing, I do think he gets it wrong.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2007Nov/0027.html

The root of the problem is here; you said:

My point is that webpages are representations so I don’t see any confusion. You have a resource and its representation.

The problem is that within the class of things that we would like to represent, are things that are being used to do the representing. I’m no mathematician or logician, but schoolboy familiarity with Venn diagrams makes me think this will cause a problem.

This problem never really arose with RDF/XML, because even though ‘documents’ were being used to ‘convey’ metadata, no-one ever made statements about the documents themselves. For some reason, no-one wanted to say that the document was created on Thursay, and update on Friday. The RDF/XML was scaffolding to carry metadata, and any further assertions were carried within that metadata. So there was never a problem if a URI was used to denote both Paris, and the place where you could go to retrieve some RDF/XML about Paris.

But my guess is that this was more luck than judgement, and either way, it’s certainly a lot trickier when you come to web pages.

Web pages are first class ‘things’ that we want to talk about, just like we might want to talk about cats, holidays and people. That means that I want to be able to indicate, for example, who created the Wikipedia page about Paris, and who created the Time Out page; and I also want to be able to say on which date each of these pages was created, when they were updated, which language they were written in, and so on.

However, in your model that is not possible. In your model, web pages don’t exist as first class ‘things’ in their own right, but instead they exist merely to ‘represent’ something else. This means that not only can I not say anything about the Time Out article or the Wikipedia one–such as rating them, comparing them, recommending that a friend read them, adding a comment to them, etc.–but if I was to say anything about them I’d be creating chaos! If I said that the Wikipedia article was created on Thursday, I’d be describing the birth of Paris! If I said I thought the Time Out article deserved 5 stars I’d be rating the city!

By the way, if I sound like I have the enthusiasm of the converted, then it’s true. The reason I’m so convinced that the distinction between resources and information resources is the right one is because last year I spent ages trying to prove that it wasn’t; I was completely convinced that this distinction was unnecessary and confusing.

But there is nothing like spending a week or two trying to disprove someone else’s assertions to help you discover why those assertions are correct. I still believe that the issue is not explained very well, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong.

I blogged about my Damascian conversion last May, in The Information Resource Debate, and RDFa, and then wrote a follow up a few days ago (after seeing your post, and Benjamin’s) in Once more on information resources and RDFa.

Regards,

Mark

–
Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer

mark.birbeck@formsPlayer.com | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com

standards. innovation.