- From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:06:10 -0400
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: Ed Davies <edavies@nildram.co.uk>, Technical Architecture Group WG <www-tag@w3.org>
On 2007-08 -30, at 19:16, Pat Hayes wrote: > >> Richard Cyganiak wrote: >>> 2. This boils down to a question wether to provide a >>> representation of a resource, or instead provide an associated >>> description of the resource (by means of a 303 redirect or hash >>> truncation). What is the difference between a representation and >>> a description? >> >> A representation _is_ the thing (to some not quite fully >> defined level of approximation) > > I really hope you are wrong about this. If you aren't, then > everything written about the nature of representation for the past, > say, 100 years, has been mistaken. We are using 'representation' in a specific sense, different from the various english senses with which it may or not have been used. It is a relationship used in web architecture, which not been discussed in th last 100 years a lot. > One of the most basic assumptions of just about everyone who has > written anything on semiotics or semantics is that the > representation of something is distinct from the thing represented. > Korzybski summed it up in a famous maxim of 'general semantics': > "the map is not the territory". > This is true if the web arch sense of representation, but it is NOT used for the relationship between the territory and the map, but between the map and a Representation (a pair of some metadata and a sequence of bits). [...] > The REST theory uses 'representation' in a special, highly > restricted, way: but even so, it is careful to distinguish the > resource itself (eg a web page) from its various representations > (what you get sent when you do a GET on that page's URI) Exactly. Tim > > Pat Hayes
Received on Friday, 31 August 2007 14:06:23 UTC