Thinking ahead to next Tuesday's telecon...

My presentation at the TAG F2F went pretty well, as far as I could
tell from where I stood.
Among other things I showed my latest diagram:
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/awwsw/jar-diagram-7.pdf (includes post-TAG changes)
which happens to correspond pretty well (not completely) with the OWL
file I checked in today
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/awwsw/http.owl

These are kitchen-sink ontologies for the purpose of discussion only;
I would expect a published ontology to contain only a few of these
classes.

Several TAG members requested that the ontology be applied in
explaining current puzzles and debates around HTTP. One of these is
the content sniffing debate. (This gets us in the direction of
language versioning and drift, which would be either terrifying or
cool, depending on your optimism level.) Another is the question of
javascript application state encoded in fragment ids that Raman has
been looking into. This idea of real-world application dovetails
nicely with Alan's persistent suggestion that we go out on the web and
find interesting kinds of objects, named by http: URIs, to model, and
my idea that the "true" definition of good-200-responder will be found
not by starting from first principles, but rather by looking to see
how 200-response-evoking http: URIs *in the wild* (meaning outside the
semweb) would most naturally refer, in the most naive possible view.

I've discovered one little puzzle: There are entity-headers that do
not seem to me to belong to what we call the 'representation'. That
is, they are not really inherent in the representation or the
resource, but rather reflect information that is known by the
particular server that is responding to requests but is not specific
to the representation or resource. (Remember than one resource may be
served by multiple servers.) These headers include Expires,
Last-modified, and Content-location. I would propose that we say that
these do not belong to the 'wa-representation'. This contradicts our
earlier consensus that every HTTP entity is a wa-representation. I
would instead invent a new class HttpRepresentation which are simply
HTTP entities stripped of these rogue headers. (They would still
include obviously identity-bearing information such as content-type.)
I think this improves the treatment of the identity of http
representations.

For example, this lets you say that the http-representation of a
"fixed resource" is one of the http-representations of a "generic
resource" without having to lie just because the Expires: of the first
is not consistent with the Expires: of the second.

If I hear no objections I'll just make this change.

Open to suggestions for what to talk about.

Jonathan

Received on Monday, 29 June 2009 21:22:53 UTC