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On 2/23/06, Richard Salz <rsalz@u...> wrote: > > But I think the hardest thing to understand about REST isn't the > > semantics of the operations per se, but how exactly to define what the > > resource is so that the operations make sense. > > Yes, naming in distributed systems has long been recognized as a a very > important, subtle, and hard problem. > > I used to say REST is just federated naming, but nobody understood me. > That's sort of funny. Very much in the spirit of Tim Bray's quote of Phil Karlton on the two hard problems in Computer Science which hits on both sides of the issue [1]. The problem seems to be why Len raises the pragmatics question, it's certainly one of my favourite rants: local semantics don't solve anything but local problems and global discovery is costly. Or to put it another way, the higher up the food chain you attempt to do your modelling the harder it is to make everyone happy. So back we go to the permathreads on how to build the Semantic Web. I happen to have pointers to two of my previous ramblings on this at hand: http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200411/msg00198.html http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200411/msg00161.html So I'll skip rehashing this territory and instead ponder the question of what already exists to identify definitions? Are there some standard name spaces on a couple of simple tags to frame anything we think that hits upon a definition of anything else without having to resort to breaking simple discourse into RDF. Eg: <swdef:concept name="vegetable">some long random ramblings</swdef:concept> Essentially, explicit but informal (latent?) semantic metadata for bottom up search engine type discovery. Of course that doesn't solve the naming question until it's propagated for a couple billion web pages but it's a start... -- Peter Hunsberger [1] http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200001/post00170.html
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