The Steven King Example

At the last meeting I accepted an action to have a closer look at the
Stephen King example in the spec 

  http://www.w3.org/2006/11/22-grddl-wg-minutes.html#action05

The example expresses in RDF, the fact that the resource identified by 

  http://www.stephenking.com/pages/works/stand/

Has a title "The Stand" and has a foaf:maker (an agent that made this
thing) who is the person that is the foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf the resource
identified by

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King/

Or more simply that

  The resource identified by
http://www.stephenking.com/pages/works/stand/ has a title "The Stand"
and was made by Steven King.

When I point my browser at this url I get back an html page describing a
novel entitled "The Stand" written by Steven King.  This web page has
considerably fewer words than a novel.  It has a title element in the
header whose content is "StephenKing.com". It also has "The Stand
(1978)" as text on the page formatted in a way that might cause it to be
interpretted as a title.  As far as I can tell there is no redirect when
I do the GET on this URL.

I think there are murky waters here, related to a tag issue
(http-range-14) and complex modelling issues concerning the distinction
between abstract works, expressions of those works and manifestations of
those expressions.  Now it may be that the strictly speaking the example
in the spec can be successfully defended as being correct, however I
think it is confusing because folks reading it might think that

  http://www.stephenking.com/pages/works/stand/

Identifies a resource that is a description of a novel, that the title
of this description is not "The Stand" and that this description was not
written by Stephen King and therefore that the RDF in the example is
false, undermining the confidence the reader in the specification.

I suggest that in this example in the spec it would better to avoid such
potential confusion and to draft a different example that will be more
intuitively correct to the reader.

There are several ways the current example could be modified to be
correct.  One would be to use a URL that clearly does identify the
novel; another would be to introduce another node into the graph so that
both the novel and its description are represented there.  

A question for the WG is whether it is worth the effort of drafting such
an alternative?

Brian

Received on Friday, 24 November 2006 10:22:20 UTC