project outline

Thoughts on finishing the current (and maybe last) phase of work

- The work product is to be a set of logical predicates (classes and
  properties), expressed in OWL, together with explanation and
  rationale.

- Decide that we are documenting the design of web architecture, not
  reality.  So this is not an ontology project, really, as it is not
  empirically based.  Call it a 'quasi-ontology' (QO).  It can be
  applied to reality only to the extent that reality adheres to the design.

- Deal with 'representations': content, media type, language.

- Introduce 'information resource' as something that 'has
  representations' (different ones at different times) and pretty much
  nothing else.  (maybe some 'phlogiston')

- Talk about properties of IRs as a way of explaining purpose.
  Purpose of IR idea = saying things about them.  Content invariants
  (e.g. author, title, publisher, date, subject, media type, language,
  ...).  Lawful variation (weather in Oaxaca, news.google.com, blogs).

- Optional topic: Versions and stability (e.g. as practiced at w3.org).

- Suggest ways to interpret various situations in terms of the QO.
  Files as IRs.  HTTP as revealing information about IRs (their
  representations).  Expires: , Content-location: , and so on.
  Status codes.

- What HTTP redirects tell us (in terms of the QO).  Additional
  predicates, if needed.  "Cafeteria" approach, meaning offer a choice
  of ways to interpret redirects in the QO.

- The 'describes' relation.  Interpreting 303 and RDF-based fragid
  definitions.

- Optional: Fragid semantics in general.

- Optional: Link relations (Link: and /.well-known/host-meta)

- Check against use cases (which we'll have to re-collect, I think
  they're scattered)

- Disclaimers (when this breaks down)

- Comparison with other work (IRW, IAO, etc)

- Choose class and property URIs and prepare OWL file and report.

Received on Friday, 5 November 2010 23:44:12 UTC