- From: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:16:25 -0500
- To: Ed Davies <edavies@nildram.co.uk>
- Cc: Technical Architecture Group WG <www-tag@w3.org>
>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. 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". >whereas a description is >only _about_ the thing. And a representation is _of_ the thing. >A huge file giving the exact position and state of every >particle in a car (in a universe without quantum uncertainty) >still wouldn't _be_ the car whereas a representation of a >web page with all the styling markup removed would still >be, to some extent, that web page. You are mixing up representation with version. Two copies of a novel are, in a sense, the same novel. But they are different versions, or volumes if you prefer. The technical terminology used throughout linguistics for this is the type/token distinction. IN your example, the two differently styled versions of the same page would be different tokens of a common type. But none of this has anything to do with what is conventionally meant by a 'representation' of something. 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) Pat Hayes -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32502 (850)291 0667 cell phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Thursday, 30 August 2007 23:16:39 UTC