I just wanted to say that this is one of the best discussions on RDF I’ve read. I’ve been somewhat familar with RDF for a while now but have basically had this nagging indecision as to what “level”/”depth” at which to apply assesertions. Should I RDFise the document and make assertions about the high-level topics and included concepts or should I make asserstions on the actual content – the words and sentences contained within that document.
I know see that this is still somewhat open to debate and interpretation. Thankfully, as a result of this discussion, I now have a much better understanding of some of the arguments surrounding this question.

Many thanks everyone.

Re, my “I Think” comment, folklore.org that sheds light on what a “Resource” is [1]. Sadly, Semantic Web parlance has lead to overloaded mangling of this critical term.

Link:

1. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_Grand_Unified_Model.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=resource

In Semantic Web lingo, Real World Objects have become darn “Non Information Resources” (yuck!). Likewise, an actual “Resource” is now referred to as an “Information Resource”.

All of the above comes down to people simply not understanding the URI abstraction which delivers: Name References (via multiple schemes including HTTP) and Address References (URLs also via multiple schemes including HTTP).

Giving Name References to Real World Objects is essential to producing structured descriptions about them in any medium (Web included) :-)

Kingsley

Links:

1. http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/about/id/entity/http/news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/world_cup_2010/8799741.stm — URI for a BBC Web Site Report .

Like everything on the traditional Web, each of the pages mentioned above are Web documents. Every Web document has its own URI. Note that a Web document is not the same as a file: a single Web document can be available in many different formats and languages, and a single file, for example a PHP script, may be responsible for generating a large number of Web documents with different URIs. A Web document is defined as something that has a URI and can return representations (responses in a format such as HTML or JPEG or RDF) of the identified resource in response to HTTP requests. In technical literature, such as Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One [AWWW], the term Information Resource is used instead of Web document.

On the traditional Web, URIs were used primarily for Web documents—to link to them, and to access them in a browser. The notion of resource identity was not so important on the traditional Web, a URL simply identified whatever we see when we type it into a browser.

Document just seems to be a slightly more palatable way of saying Information Resource. Personally I prefer Resource and Representation from REST. So when people say that it’s important that they can get metadata for a Document I think in my head that they’d like to have metadata for a Representation–which normally come over the wire in HTTP response headers.