resource and representation

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moved from www-tag:
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Jul/0109.html

apologies for any loss of context
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-tag-request@w3.org [mailto:www-tag-request@w3.org]
> On Behalf Of Patrick Stickler
>
> It seems the real problem here is the implicit overloading of
> URIs by the Web architecture which is far too low a 
> resolution for Semantic Web agents.
> 
> Yes, in theory, the Web architecture provides mechanisms to 
> name each variant representation separately -- and thus, one 
> could then describe each variant to express its 
> characteristics and relation to the actual resource -- but 
> that is seldom used in practice, and certainly does not 
> appear to be encouraged by the Web architecture.


More specifically: RDF agents would do well to be able to reason in
terms of URIs that point to only one resource, instead of reasoning with
mime-types and they would do well to be able to interact in some other
form than HTTP conneg. 

Personally I have no problem building layered reasoning systems with
conneg and mimetype resolution for the time being. That's all ok:
layered reasoning architectures will be the way to build robust systems
for the SemWeb (a la Muller's INTERRAP). 

As for the level of SemWeb stuff that Tim BL has been keynoting for a
few years and for the requirements of the WebOnt crowd. Well, I guess
http style resolution isn't entirely adequate. This is because we want
to get a level where RDF agents interact *with each other* and not just
with the current Web accessible resources.

The discussion on the TAG seems to have been entirely about agents doing
negotiating with resources for representations rather than agents
talking among themselves about resources. The latter is both where
things get interesting and where overloading URIs, in Patrick's sense of
overloading, may cause problems in terms of merging RDF graphs and
avoiding junk entailments. If someone can show me this simply can not be
done with the current Web architecture, I'll acknowledge there is an
architectural issue that the Tag need to discuss. Otherwise I'm inclined
to say let people build some RDF infrastructure for a while and see what
happens.

Bill de hÓra

..
Propylon
www.propylon.com

Received on Friday, 5 July 2002 07:44:12 UTC