Re: [Linking-open-data] watchdog.net and LOD best practices

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 6:21 PM, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter@gmail.com> wrote:
>  The insistence on slash URI's having 303 is mostly philosophical if
>  you are still going to allow hash URI's which people have no real
>  reason to go away from. When you consider that user agents do not send
>  the hash part anyway, hence you have no idea at the server whether
>  they are wanting the resource or just part, so you send back the
>  result of a slash URL resolution... No need to push someone away
>  because they didn't follow and arbitrary rule for "non-information
>  resources".

I'm really not trying to push anyone away -- and I apologize if it
appeared that I was. My exposure to linking data has largely been
informed by watching discussions on here and reading documents like
How to Publish Linked Data on the Web [1] and Cool URIs for the
Semantic Web [2].

The value of these documents IMHO, is that the provide some pretty
clear guidance on URI design w/ httpRange-14 in mind. I know Aaron is
not a newcomer to the web or RDF -- so I was genuinely curious about
the thought process behind the service.

> If there is any experimental evidence the Semantic Web
>  will actually succeed if there are double the number of requests
>  needed for a single resolution then it may be interesting to revisit
>  the idea of assuming people are bad semantic web citizens because they
>  implement things pragmatically.

That's why the hash option is there. I'm fairly certain that the
watchdog rdf descriptions would just have to use a hash URI in the
description to be compliant--no double requests or 303 is necessary.
For example:

@prefix : <http://watchdog.net/about/api#> .

<http://watchdog.net/us/MD-08#this> a :District;
  :almanac <http://nationaljournal.com/pubs/almanac/2008/people/md/rep_md08.htm>;
  :area_sqmi 307;
  :center_lat 39.0231;
  :center_lng -77.1421;
  :cook_index "D+20";
  :est_population 700364;
  :est_population_year 2005;
  :median_income 68306;
  :name "MD-08";
  :poverty_pct 6.2;  :state <http://watchdog.net/us/md>;  :voting
true;  :wikipedia
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland's_8th_congressional_district>;
:zoom_level 10;.

>  It would however be nice to have link rel="alternate"
>  type="application/rdf+xml" href="blah.xml" etc. in the head of the
>  html though to facilitate the discovery of the RDF/N3/JSON materials
>  automatically. That doesn't imply that the blah.xml has to 303
>  redirect to a third resource "just in case" though.

Right it doesn't have to. But the URI used to identify a district
would just need a hash part appended to it as above. I'm not really
trying to pedantic here, I'm trying to understand the best practices
myself.

//Ed

[1] http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/

Received on Tuesday, 15 April 2008 23:33:26 UTC