Re: URIs for Concepts: Best Practices

On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, David Menendez wrote:

> > A first question is, is it OK to use http: URIs for concepts?  Sorry
> > to drag this old chestnut up again, but I need some clear answer on
> > best practices for this.  Are we not at all concerned that the same
> > URI may identify both a thesaurus concept and a resolveable network
> > resource (i.e. the file containing the RDF data)?
>
> It would be confusing for a URI to identify a thesaurus concept and an
> RDF file. The key, as I see it, is the idea that the response to an HTTP
> Get is a representation of the resource, not the resource itself. The
> fact that <http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Dog> returns an RDF/XML
> document, doesn't mean that it identifies that particular document.

That's the REST point of view and it's reiterated in the recent TAG
publication.

> If,
> for some reason, you wanted to talk about that RDF/XML document instead
> of the word "Dog", you would need to use a blank node or a different
> URI.

Yes; there's no generally applicable vocab currently (as far as I'm
aware) in RDF to describe the relationship between a URI (as a web
address rather than a resource identifier, so probably in the format of
a datatyped literal) and stuff you get when dereferencing that URI,
including specific content-negotiated HTTP conversations. But there's no
reason why there shouldn't be, and it'd let you explicitly avoid
confusions like "Ora Lassila's size in bytes".

> Not everyone agrees with this position.

Including, I'm led to believe, some members of TAG.



-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
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