ContentReplicaDescription? (fwd re Re: comments? mirrors.txt)

there's a thread over on www-talk that might be of 
interest to RDFists. See attached or online archives at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/2003MarApr/0019.html

Basic idea is to use RDF to describe replication of content.
It's related to concerns that crop up in P2P and URN discussions, 
and many other places. If some bunch-of-bytes is available in many
ways/places around the Internet, how can we represent that so 
clients can exploit the redundancy (eg. for parallel downloads or 
finding nearest server).

I'm looking for related links on use of RDF for this; it'd be nice to 
be able to say on www-talk 'here is how folk have approached this 
with RDF', rather than 'Hey, if you used RDF, your .txt files would 
be harder to read and take up more space...' 1/2 ;-)

Relevant links I remember: 

	http://www.ilrt.bristol.ac.uk/people/cmdjb/talks/www9/
	Getting There From Here - Deploying RDF in a Large Scale Mirror Service

	Metadata, Web caching and URI Resolution, Dan Brickley & Jan Grant
	http://www.desire.org/docs/research/demonstrations/uri/
	(3 year old demo still working; something to be said for clientside Prolog :)

Content specific mirror description links are relevant too, eg. IAFA templates (from FTP era),
Redhat's RDF format for describing RPM's, etc. 

Anything else I'm missing? I'm sure there must be a bunch... ie. components of an 
answer to the question "How have people used RDF to describe the replication of 
content around the Internet?", or variations on that them.

thanks for any suggestions,

Dan

attached mail follows:

Perhaps RDF might be a more natural language for expressing the 
meta-data about the mirror itself?

Also, perhaps the RDF could provide a serialization format for the URI 
resolution.  So you could create the THTTP URI resolution service 
defined in RFC 2169 that uses the RDF as the source of its data?

Andre John Mas wrote:
> Thanks for the references. I have taken a look through the
> documentation and have a few comments:
> 
> Traditionally mirrors provide a reference to their geographic
> location. While by no means a guarantee to improved transfer
> speeds, this is a useful reference, especially for clients that
> wish to use a single source for data transfers (as opposed
> to parallel downloads). Also a brief 'advertisment' of the name
> of the hosting service is provided. While this information is
> not necessary for accessing the data, I believe that this
> information should be provided on an optional basis. Some
> companies hosting the mirrors do want to have their name
> mentioned as for them it advertisment in exchange for service.
> 

-- 
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks
http://onionnetworks.com/