Re: Announcement: "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" - W3C SWEO IG Note

Pat Hayes wrote:
> Nice document. A few quibbles:
>
> ------------
>
> "When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can 
> reduce a client's performance considerable."
>
> This sentence is not grammatical English. Rewrite to:
>
> When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can 
> considerably reduce a client's performance.
>
> or:
>
> When using 303 URIs for an ontology, like FOAF, network delay can 
> reduce a client's performance to a considerable degree.
>
My apologies for not reviewing the document more carefully. It seems to 
be good stuff, but I missed this claim. And (as responsible party for 
FOAF ns) think this overstates the problem.  Overstates it to a 
considerable degree, even.

Clients can cache the 303 redirects, and the resulting URL's content can 
also be cached. For a small ontology of 5 or 6 terms, this involves 5 or 
6 HTTP redirects plus the main fetch. All cachable. For modest sized 
ontologies like FOAF, with ~60 terms, it may be a slight nuisance, ... 
but let's keep it in perspective: loading a single Flickr page probably 
involves more HTTP traffic. And for massive ontologies, like the various 
wordnet representations, breaking them up into parts has its own merits: 
why download a description of 50000 classes just because you've 
encountered @yone.

If somone has specific software engineering problems with a Web client 
for FOAF data that is suffering "to a considerable degree", please post 
your code and performance stats and let's have a look at fixing it. 
Maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_pipelining is something we can 
get wired into a few more SemWeb crawling environments; for instance 
data as much as for schemas.

cheers,

Dan

--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Wednesday, 9 April 2008 08:17:22 UTC