The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 4th Edition

1.3. The Concept of “Resource”

Resource has an ordinary sense of anything of value that can support goal-oriented activity. This definition means that a resource can be a physical thing, a non-physical thing, information about physical things, information about non-physical things, or anything you want to organize. Other words that aim for this broad scope are entity, object, item, and instance. Document is often used for an information resource in either digital or physical format; artifact refers to resources created by people, and asset for resources with economic value.

Resource has specialized meaning in Internet architecture. It is conventional to describe web pages, images, videos, and so on as resources, and the protocol for accessing them, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), uses the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI).8[Web]

Concert Tickets

Tickets are physical artifacts that convey event-related metadata: including time, place, and seat number; price and terms of admission; and featured performers. For concert goers, tickets offer the promise of all that, and a memory of the ineffable quality of more.

(Photo by Murray Maloney.)

Concert Ticket

A concert ticket is a vehicle for conveying a package of assertions about an event, so it is a description resource, like a card in a library card catalog. A concert ticket is also a resource in its own right, with intrinsic value; it can ...