RE: Do resources have representations?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ext Jon Hanna [mailto:jon@spin.ie]
> Sent: 28 July, 2003 17:02
> To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Do resources have representations?
>
>
> ... Authority need exist only is so far as 
> authorising the use of
> the identifier to identify a resource, not to make any 
> further statements
> than that.

I don't think I agree with you here, at least not completely.

For URIs which include a web authority component, one
can treat as authoritative all statements about a resource which
are published by that web authority.

Thus, while there may be all kinds of statements on the SW about
some resource http://example.org/foo, those statements that are
provided as the results of an explicit query to the actual
web authority of the URI, e.g.

   MGET http://example.org/foo HTTP/1.1

per the model defined by http://sw.nokia.com/URIQA.html,
should be considered to be authoritative.

There may, of course, be other notions of authority, and
means to attribute different kinds of authoritative weight 
to statements from various sources, but one should be able
to presume that statements made by the web authority of
a URI are authoritative; at least as authoritative as the 
representations provided when dereferencing the URI using 
GET are "authoritative representations" of that resource.

> ...
> 
> > This has practical relevance for me because I'm toying with 
> creating a
> > web server that uses descriptions similar to this to define what a
> > resource is and which representations it has. For example, 
> you could say
> >
> >      <http://example.org/img/logo> hasRepresentation
> >          <http://example.org/img/logo.svg> .
> >      <http://example.org/img/logo.svg>  mimeType  "image/svg+xml" .
> >      <http://example.org/img/logo.svg>  preference  "1" .
> >
> >      <http://example.org/img/logo> hasRepresentation
> >          <http://example.org/img/logo.png> .
> >      <http://example.org/img/logo.png>  mimeType  "image/png" .
> >      <http://example.org/img/logo.png>  preference "0.5" .
> >

I've also been thinking along these lines, and would love to
see a first stab at a standardized vocabulary for capturing
basic Web behavior, including content negotiation, robot
instructions/constraints, etc. using SW machinery and including
an ontology of common web-related resources which can be
used to clarify the denotation of URIs (WebPage, WebSite, 
Representation, etc.)

> I played with a vocabulary for describing these relationships 
> a while back.
> <http://www.spin.ie/jon/rep/rep.xml> documents them if you're 
> interested.

I'll definitely have a look, myself. 

Cheers,

Patrick

--
Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Monday, 28 July 2003 10:53:11 UTC