Re: Hidden triples and self-description

Just to wrap this up ... for the time being ...

On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 05:34:29AM -0400, Karsten Otto wrote:
> The case you described appears only when you cross the layer boundaries
> between RDFS aware applications and plain RDF only applications. As long
> as you are aware of this crossing, you can write your applications to
> prepare their messages accordingly. A new mimetypes could solve this issue
> in a general way - but then you would need a new mimetype for OWL too, and
> any possible layer crossing! I am not sure if this really is so common a
> problem to justify all the trouble.

I just found this;

http://esw.w3.org/topic/AnarchicScalability

Which pretty much expresses my concerns, in particular;

"RDF is stuck right now in not having a standard way to indicate which
extensions/ontologies are being used."

My *hunch* is that dereferencable media types (i.e. media types as
URIs) which resolve to a declaration of (at least?) their axiomatic
triples, is what is needed to complete(*) the self-describability of
RDF.  But I've got a lot more reading to do ... 8-)

FWIW, there's work under way to try to bridge media types and URIs.

(*) we also need mandatory extensions within RDF, I believe

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca