Re: N3 rule for proposed Resource-Description header

Jonathan Rees writes:

> I actually have a very hard time coming up with use cases for follow- 
> your-nose in general - the only ones I know of are web closure, 
> semantic browsing (eg tabulator), and self describing web, and none 
> of these seems very compelling to me - they don't have constituencies 
> saying "I'm having a hard time getting my work done, and if only 
> follow-your-nose worked better, I'd be much happier".

I would argue that for the traditional (non-semantic Web), Google and 
similar crawler-based search engines are a "killer app" for the 
self-describing Web.  These engines depend completely on the ability to 
dereference a URI without any prior arrangement with the resource owner. 
It's absolutely crucial that the spider either understand what it's been 
given, or else, be able to reliable determine that it does not understand 
it (e.g. Content-type is a media type that the crawler doesn't know). 
While it's currently the case that Google doesn't, as far as I know, take 
much advantage of RDF, GRDDL, or similar technologies, it still seems 
fairly evident to me that search should be included in your list of use 
cases above.  Did you mean that to be covered by "Web Closure"?  That 
comes close, in a way, but I don't find it really evocative of the 
importance of Web-scale search.

Noah

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Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
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Received on Monday, 7 April 2008 04:40:40 UTC