Re: State of SSN: comment on namespaces and urls

Once we accept  that inclusion in a file or document is one of the few means we have to indicate ontology membership for axioms, then a page at a URL is one way to give that document more stability and authority. Using the namespace of an RDF vocabulary as a URL to reference that vocabulary is one approach, though that assigns meaning to the namespace that it doesn’t originally possess. It would be clearer to use the IRI / URL of an RDF dataset / named graph containing that vocabulary. Established practices, of course, don’t need to make sense, so we should probably take both measures (dataset and namespace) just to be accommodating and helpful.

—Josh

> On Feb 1, 2017, at 10:57 AM, Francois Daoust <fd@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi Kerry,
> 
> Le 01/02/2017 à 03:11, Kerry Taylor a écrit :
> [...]
>> I believe the W3C often has no ontology sitting at a namespace uri, but
>> instead a list of entities in the namespace and some documentation. Can
>> Francois comment?
> 
> I'm not sure what you call "a list of entities in the namespace and some documentation". In the linked data era we're now in, people expect to be able to dereference namespace uris and get meaningful information, meaning an HTML page for humans, some RDF serialization for machines.
> 
> That was not the case some years ago, but I think we typically publish ontology files at namespace uris nowadays, possibly using content negotiation so that people may see an HTML page, a Turtle serialization of the ontology, etc. depending on the Accept HTTP header. That is the case for the RDF, RDF Schema, OWL, Prov namespace URIs for instance.
> 
> Francois.
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 1 February 2017 16:19:40 UTC