octets vs. characters

(My apologies for continuing to dribble these in. If you want me to  
stop, or to send my LC comments elsewhere, please let me know.)

The mapping to RDF draft says:

An RDF syntax ontology document is any sequence of octets accessible  
from some given IRI that can be parsed into an RDF graph, and that  
then be transformed into an OWL 2 ontology by the canonical parsing  
process instantiated as specified in this section.

You can't parse octets to RDF unless you know the media type and the  
character encoding. Therefore you must say that an ontology document  
is a triple {media type, character encoding, octet sequence}, or  
something else that has enough information to enable parsing. This  
tuple would correspond to what HTTP calls an "entity" and what webarch  
calls a "representation".

The section is called "Mapping from RDF graphs" so I don't even know  
why a document is required. Why not just specify a mapping from RDF  
graphs? You are already blurring the distinction between "ontology"  
and "ontology document" (I take the latter as a "representation" of  
the ontology according to webarch, since you're using the same URI to  
"identify" both), so this should be easy.

Best
Jonathan

Received on Sunday, 1 February 2009 20:41:07 UTC