Re: Question on the boundaries of content negotiation in the context of the Web of Data

Michael,

Speaking for the W3C TAG under ACTION-232 (http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/actions/232):

On February 12, 2009 (not quite a year ago), you posted http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2009Feb/0074.html a question to the TAG with regard to content negotiation. In the message, you ask:



... is the PNG *representation* derived via conneg from the generic resource <http://sw-app.org/sandbox/house> equivalent to the RDF in Turtle? If not, why not? If it is, can you please point me to a finding, note, a specification, etc. that 'normatively' defines what 'equivalency' really is?


After discussions of the topic under TAG ISSUE-53 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/issues/53 and  discussions and review under ACTION-231 http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/group/track/actions/231 and back and forth with the IETF HTTPBIS working group, the text of the HTTPBIS document has been updated in preparation for a forthcoming Internet Draft.

See HTTBIS bug 81 http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/81, which points to the actual text, found currently in http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/changeset/745:

In particular, the HTTP spec will say:

Note that in all cases, the supplier of representations has the responsibility for determining which representations might  be considered to be the "same information".

Following the discussions that led up to this, I believe the TAG intent is to answer your specific question:

 There will be specification text (in HTTP BIS) that gives the supplier of  http://sw-app.org/sandbox/house the responsibility for defining "equivalency".

Larry
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