Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and Linked Data

Hi all,

Richard Cyganiak, Tom Heath and me are currently writing a tutorial on how 
to publish Linked Data [1] on the Web and ran into some terminology 
questions concerning Web Architecture.

Here is the problem statement together with an example: Within the Linking 
Open Data community project [2] different data sources (URI owners) publish 
information about Tim Berners-Lee using different HTTP URIs:

1. DBpedia: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee
2. Hannover DBLP Server: 
http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/resource/authors/Tim_Berners-Lee
3. Berlin DBLP Server: 
http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007
4. RDF Book Mashup: 
http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/Tim+Berners-Lee

The first 3 data sources follow the W3C TAG "Dereferencing HTTP URIs" 
finding [3]  and redirect via HTTP 303 to documents describing Tim 
Berners-Lee when the URIs are dereferenced over the Web. Therefore, the URIs 
identify Tim Berners-Lee as a non-information resource. This redirect also 
supports HTTP content negotiation and leads to HTML as well as RDF 
descriptions of Tim.

5. Tim also publishes a FOAF profile in which he assigns the URI 
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i to himself.

Question 1: According to the terminology of the Architecture of the WWW 
document [4] are all these URIs aliases for the same non-information 
resource (our current view) or are they referring to different resources? 
Does the TAG finding "On Linking Alternative Representations To Enable 
Discovery And Publishing " [5] about generic and specific resources apply 
here, meaning that the URIs 1,2,3,5 refer to different specific 
non-information resources that are related to one generic non-information 
resource?

Question 2: When the URIs are dreferenced they provide quite different 
information about Tim, which reflects the knowledge and the opinion of the 
specific URI owner about him. Within our tutorial we need to talk about this 
information and therefore need a term to refer to a concept that can be 
described as "information provided by a specific URI owner about a 
non-information resource", for example Tim. Depending on the answer to 
question 1, what would be the correct Web Architecture term to refer to this 
concept? Or is such a term missing?

Question 3: Depending on the answer to question 1, is it correct to use 
owl:sameAs [6] to state that http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i and 
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee refer to the same thing as it is 
done in Tim's profile.

Any clarifications on these question would be highly welcomed.

Cheers

Chris


[1] http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
[2] 
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData
[3] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/httpRange-14/2007-05-31/HttpRange-14
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/
[5] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/alternatives-discovery.html
[6] http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/#sameAs-def

--
Chris Bizer
Freie Universität Berlin
+49 30 838 54057
chris@bizer.de
www.bizer.de

Received on Saturday, 7 July 2007 12:43:40 UTC