Re: Important Question re. WebID Verifiers & Linked Data

On 12/21/11 12:35 PM, Mo McRoberts wrote:
> On 21 Dec 2011, at 14:46, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>
>> Is a WebID verifier supposed to be a Linked Data consumer ?
>> Is a WebID verifier supposed to be an RDF consumer?
>>
>> Please understand that RDF != Linked Data. It's just one of the options for creating and publishing Linked Data.
> If, as you say (and I’d agree), RDF-published-as-Linked Data is one of the options of “Linked Data”, then WebID is surely  both — but it's possible that it isn't a Linked Data consumer for all of the different flavours of Linked Data that you’d like.

I used to think so until Henry expressed questionable suggestions about 
URI handling that breaks the abstraction re. WebID verifiers.

>
> > From my reading of the specification, right now, a WebID verifier is a Linked Data consumer which is capable of consuming RDF/XML and RDFa.

It doesn't even do that.

Currently, it does so if a specific kind of HTTP URI is used as a WebID. 
Thus, we have WebID verifiers not even using HTTP properly i.e., 
refusing to follow redirection responses. These responses are 
fundamental to Linked Data since Name / Address disambiguation is vital 
for its kind of data access oriented indirection.

>   It could consume other things as well, but those two are what's baked into the spec. A consumer which can *also* handle XRDS, InfoCard and HTML5 Microdata is also fine and conformant.

See comment above, its broken before we even get to what you mention 
above :-)

>
>> In addition:
>>
>> Is a WebID verifier supposed to be an HTTP client?
> At a minimum, yes. As with the representations, there's no reason why it can't be an HTTP client and also an LDAP client and a WHOIS client and a HKP client…

Yes, but that isn't what's happening if 303 redirection isn't handled.

>
>> Is a WebID verifier supposed to be able to leverage HTTP content negotiation?
> Yes. If nothing else, the suggested WebID URI pattern won’t work for the vast majority of people without conneg…

Yep! And that's were we are right now as borne out by these recent WebID 
verifier tests.
>
> M.
>


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
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OpenLink Software
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