RE: URI policy for thesaurus concepts

Miles, AJ (Alistair)  writes:

> > That's fine - I ought to be able to ask (via content negotiation)
> > for a representation of a concept (or a thesaurus) by an HTTP
> > request for each of those URIs. What advice are you offering on the
> > stuff that's found at the end of those URIs?
> 
> That's a whole other ball game.  As I understand it, the choice is
> between the HTTP GET request for the concept URI returning either a
> machine readable or a human readable description of that concept.  I
> may have boiled that down too much - have I missed anything?      

With content negotiation, you can do both: requests asking for HTML get
HTML, and requests asking for RDF/XML get RDF/XML. (The rare case where
the request states no preference is probably someone using "curl" or
"wget"; I'm guessing they'd want RDF/XML, but there's no real negative
consequence to choosing either way.)

It's even possible to do content negotiation when serving static files,
thanks to mod_content and equivalents.

> The other question is, should the request for the thesaurus URI also
> return the entire content of the thesaurus?  Personally I think no,
> but again I'm not sure about that.

I'd have a description of the thesaurus at its base URI (again, in both
HTML and RDF via content negotiation), and put the whole content at a
separate URI if desired.
-- 
David Menendez <zednenem@psualum.com> <http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>

Received on Friday, 30 April 2004 16:18:12 UTC