RE: [xri] [Glossary] Definition of "Resource" and "Attribute" (lo ng)

[Drummond Reed <Drummond.Reed@onename.com>]

>Bernard Vatant [mailto:bernard.vatant@mondeca.com] wrote:
>
>Sure. My favourite one along the same lines is more ancient, being
>attributed to Confucius:
>
>"Were I called to bring back order into the Empire,
>my first concern would be to restore the meaning of words."

Bernard, great quote.

One thing I should have done in that message was acknowledge that knowledge
representation folks have dealt with these subjects for years, as you
pointed out, and that they have rich vocabularies for these areas. For that
reason the XRI TC has already agreed to use the smallest possible glossary
in the most precise way it can, to reuse the terms we can that provide the
easiest and most widely accepted mapping into the XRI problem space.

Following this rule, and because our mission is defining a new type of
abstract URI, the term "resource" ends out being the most central term of
all (literally, the middle of the three initials). It is closely followed by
the terms "attribute", "identifier", and "context".

So from your message it sounds like you would agree that "resource" and
"attribute" are both relative terms, i.e., anything down to the very
smallest attribute can be considered a resource, and any resource right up
to the very largest can be considered an attribute, given the right context.
Is that right?

=Drummond