It's the difference in identity as established by a
process handling a representation and existence of
the thing so identified.
It isn't difficult to understand. The thing only
has identity in the sense that the system has a
unique id. The system has the property of uniqueness,
not the thing. There is no way out of this, but you
don't need one. ALL you are talking about is a system
object, not the person. It is a red herring until someone
asserts the two are equivalent.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Joshua Allen [mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 7:08 PM
To: John Cowan; Paul Prescod
Cc:
Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Re: Why REST? (RE: [xml-dev] WSIO- With Name)
> > That's all the Web does. Ship descriptions (formally known as
> > representations) of resources around. It does not move resources.
>
> Absolutely. But a person is not a hyperdocument, even if they may
> sometimes share the same representations. In an RDF sense, they
> can't be identified. But in a topic map sense, the document can
I don't understand this -- why is it not possible to identify a person
in an RDF sense? A URN is just a name; just like "John Cowan" and
"mailto:" are adequate ways to identify you for
anyone on the mailing list who wants to refer to you.
