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Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> Jonathan Borden wrote:
> > The core issue is whether we are able to describe anything but "documents"
> > on the Web. One might take the position that nothing but documents exists o
> > the Web. But it is the literal incantation of a document which is defined a
> > the _entity_ (the series of bits)
>
> I don't think the incantation of bits is sufficient cause to believe
> that an abstraction called a resource lurks behind the bits.
I stopped believing in "resources" on my third or fourth
attempt to read the RDF M&S spec.
If you look hard enough, you can see that the whole thing
boils down to:
"A URI is a thing that that identifies a Resource"
and
"A Resource is anything that is identified by a URI".
So I gave up trying to figure out what a resource is
and re-read the spec thinking only in terms of URIs
(which at least have an EBNF grammar, so you can tell
one when you see one). RDF finally made more sense.
Now it's still not clear to me that anything useful will ever
come out of making Statements about Resources and Properties,
but you can do a lot today by resolving a URI and getting back
a Document, or POSTing one to a Web server. I don't care if
that Document is really just a Representation of a Resource,
since I'll never get my hands on the Resource anyway.
--Joe English (Yow! Am I enlightened yet?)
jenglish@flightlab.com
(P.S. to Simon -- it sounds like using java.net.URI instead
of lava.lang.String for URIs is just making more work for
yourself unless you're going to be resolving them. In fact
the equals() method isn't even correct for XML namespace names.)
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