Yes, too pedantic Bob. ;-) But really useful to be pointed out.
However, I think it really depends on the context you are using the terms (as is often the case). I was considering how I might reword any mention of resolution and dereferencing in my beginners guide to persistent identifiers in accordance with what you have pointed out, but I think changing "resolution" to "dereference" will just confuse people in a beginners guide (ie they are probably too novice to know the difference, or even care)
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Richard Pyle Sent: Friday, 15 October 2010 7:02 a.m. To: 'Bob Morris'; tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-content] "resolution" of URIs usually used improperly
Thanks, Bob. I was unaware of the difference until now.
Such is the bane of our community (homonyms, synonyms, and misapplied terms).
I sigh in an analagous way everytime someone refers to a taxon name, when they are really referring to a taxon concept.
Rich
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Bob Morris Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2010 2:51 AM To: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org Subject: [tdwg-content] "resolution" of URIs usually used improperly
Is it too pedantic to wish that people would not use "resolve" when they mean "dereference"? The terms are distinguished in RFC 3986[1]: "URI "resolution" is the process of determining an access mechanism and the appropriate parameters necessary to dereference a URI; this resolution may require several iterations. To use that access mechanism to perform an action on the URI's resource is to "dereference" the URI." [1]
I bet the concensus answer to my question is "Yes". Sigh.
[1]http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt
Bob (The Pedant) Morris
-- Robert A. Morris Emeritus Professor of Computer Science UMASS-Boston 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, MA 02125-3390 Associate, Harvard University Herbaria email: morris.bob@gmail.com web: http://bdei.cs.umb.edu/ web: http://etaxonomy.org/mw/FilteredPush http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram phone (+1) 857 222 7992 (mobile) _______________________________________________ tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
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