RE: Using URIs to identify non-information resources

hi, just wanted to suggest continuing this thread
somewhere else (e.g. on semantic-web) as the promotion
of a centralised service shouldn't really be considered
a best practice. The thing-descr..-approach is also
quite similar to all the (failed) attempts such as "the
info uri scheme" etc., and with the TAG compromise, it's
getting really easy to add this type of functionality to
rdf apps directly, without having to rely on an external
service or hard-coded URI-examination.

(It would be nice though to see a swbpd note about how to
best implement the TAG suggestion, possible ways of
naming resources so that the 303-mechanism works, if/how
to provide machine-readable resource descriptions, and
other things like that.)
</rant>

benjamin

--
Benjamin Nowack

Kruppstr. 100
45145 Essen, Germany
http://www.bnode.org/


On 15.08.2005 11:03:20, Booth, David (HP Software - Boston) wrote:
>
>> 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 16:58:30 UTC