RE: What is CONTENT?

["Hilarie Orman" <HORMAN@novell.com>]

Well, the issue is not exactly "what is content" but "what is the
relationship between a URI and the content?"  And there is a further
issue of the mapping between URI's and sets of related content.
I believe that none of these questions are answerable at the
current time.  Consider the following questions:

It appears that a URI has two parts - a name and extra stuff (metadata).
The combination yields a content response.  It's a many-to-one mapping
at best.  

Sometimes, we think, there is a functional relationship between two
sets of content:
   f(content-A, metadata1) = content-B
   f(content-A, metadata2) = content-C

We can ask, is there a URI that produces content-B as the response?  Is it
name(content-A)||metadata1?  Must there be?

Alternatively, we can ask, if 
  URI1 = somestring||metadata1  and produces the response content-A
  UR2 = somestring||metadata2  and produces the response content-B
then, can we assume that there is some well-known function f, such that
     f(content-A, metadata1) = content-B
     f(content-A, metadata2) = content-C


>>> "Iacovou, Danny" <danny.iacovou@ebenx.com> 11/10/00 04:46PM >>>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hilarie Orman [mailto:HORMAN@novell.com] 

> It's just an encoding of application-level data, isn't it?
> Of course it's digital, this is the Internet; it's most 
> probably octets, but
> that's not a particularly helpful part of the definition; 
> same for "ordered".
> The type can be specified in the encoding; that's normal.

  Well, at least one other person expressed concern that there doesn't seem
  to be a way of associating meta-data with the "content" given some of the
  definitions of content that have been floating around. 
 
  It could very well be that associating meta-data and preserving it during
  "transport" is do'able as things stand right now, but I haven't figured it
out,
  and nobody has explained it to me.
  
  It could also very well be that meta-data isn't of importance. But nobody
has
  said that either. So I'am assuming that Alex French, and myself, have some
  point in raising this issue.

  Right now we all seem to agree that content is something that can be
pointed to
  via a URI. I think we should figure out exactly what CONTENT is going to
be, what
  we are going to with the meta-data, and then, perhaps, ask the question of
how to
  treat "multiple-views" of an item (which is actually different CONTENT per
view
  since each view will have its own URI - but to know the grouping of the
views and
  which URIs can be grouped together would be very useful to know).