Re: [pedantic-web] Re: The OWL Ontology URI

On Fri, 2010-05-14 at 17:49 -0400, Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
> 
> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
>         however, as it seems to drive a truck through the purpose of
>         httpRange14, since it means there is then no way, given a URI
>         which yields a 200 level response, to figure out what it
>         denotes.
> 
> 
> That's the conclusion behind my recommendation that one uses 303 (or
> link header). 
> 
> 
> But maybe it's too pessimistic. Maybe we know a little, like it's not
> a potato. Perhaps that the resource is something from a union of the
> sorts of things one found on the web before use semantic guys came
> around. Things like:
> 
> 
> Services
> Questionaires
> Documents
> Instrument readouts
> Resolution independent images
> Slices of databases
> ...
> 
> 
> However, knowing that something is in the union of the above *tells us
> very little of practical use in semantic web applications*. 

But what do you need to know about the resource?  I guess there's an
implicit assumption that if the server gives a 200 response then you
don't *need* to know, in RDF, much more about the resource than the fact
that it *is* an w:InformationResource (in addition to whatever else it
might be).  Is that your concern, that you want to know what *else* X is
(in addition to being a particular w:InformationResource that just gave
you a particular w:Representation)?

At present, the URI owner for a resource X is forced to make a choice:
"Should I configure my server to return 200, and thus provide no
standard way for RDF users to find additional metadata about X?  Or
should I return a 303, thus giving RDF users a way to find my metadata
but complicating my server configuration?"  But note that this choice is
not rigidly tied to the "is X be considered an IR or should it not be
considered an IR?" question, because RDF metadata may *also* be
desirable for things that all would agree are IRs.  It is really a
question about how to get RDF metadata.  And clearly the Link header
would help in that regard, so that RDF metadata could be obtained even
if a 200 response is served:
http://esw.w3.org/LinkHeader 



-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
Cleveland Clinic (contractor)

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of Cleveland Clinic.

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 2010 18:27:53 UTC