RE: Using URIs to identify non-information resources

> From:  Lars Marius Garshol
> 
> . . . If you resolve a URI and 
> it returns 303 you know that the URI might identify something 
> (what you got back, or what it described, but you can't tell 
> which), 

That seems overly pessimistic.  If the URI owner wants you to know what
the URI identifies then you certainly *can* tell which it identifies,
because you will be forwarded to a document that will tell you
explicitly.  

Furthermore, if it was a thing-described-by.org URI like
http://thing-described-by.org?http://dbooth.org/2005/dbooth/
then you can tell by inspection (without performing an HTTP retrieval)
that the URI does not directly identify an information resource at
thing-described-by.org, because of the delegation of authority that
thing-described-by.org provides:
http://thing-described-by.org/#Delegation_of_Authority

> whereas if it doesn't return 303 it definitely 
> identifies the thing you got back.

. . . assuming it returns a 2xx, you mean.

> . . . In 
> an RDF graph of interesting size . . . there will be such a 
> number of URIs that trying to dereference all of them is 
> going to take so long that there is no way it can be worth 
> the effort. . . .

Again, this is an advantage of using thing-described-by.org URIs: those
network accesses can be optimized away, as described at
http://thing-described-by.org/#optimizing

In summary, if URI owners want you to know what their URIs identify, and
they use thing-described-by.org URIs, then it seems to me that we have a
scalable and deterministic solution.

David Booth

Received on Monday, 15 August 2005 15:05:18 UTC