Re: Content negotiation: Why always redirect from non-information resource to information resource?

In message <4B5F84B9.9020601@openlinksw.com>, Kingsley Idehen 
<kidehen@openlinksw.com> writes
>
>As for the HTML part, this is about providing an HTML representation of 
>the Object (Resource) metadata rather than being confined to a single 
>representation. Note, these days RDF based resource descriptions are 
>served up in quite a few representations: HTML, HTML + RDFa, N3/Turtle, 
>JSON, RDF/XML, TriX, TriG etc..

If you see the URL as representing the subject of discourse (= 
non-information resource), there are also non-RDF representations of 
that subject which can be associated with the URL (and requested using 
the 303 mechanism, by specifying a suitable Accept header).

A Topic Map fragment (in various serializations) would be one obvious 
candidate.  Topic Maps and RDF can be seen as complementary ways of 
supporting search, inference, etc., each with its own strengths.

In addition, it recently occurred to me that the same mechanism can also 
be used to deliver an XML representation of the non-information 
resource. In other words, a machine-processible version of the rich, 
textual, human-readable HTML representation mentioned above.  This could 
simply be in XHTML, or more interestingly in an XML application format 
such as TEI, EAD or Docbook.

Bringing full XML into the infochain would allow machine processes 
access to a fuller story, whether they are reasoning with the data they 
have found or constructing data views to present to end-users.  At 
present, Linked Data browsers seem to be limited to displaying sets of 
RDF triples as their "result sets".

In general, allowing a single non-information resource URL to be 
associated with a wide variety of machine-processible formats gives us 
the potential to expand the power and expressiveness of the Linked Data 
web in new ways.

Richard
-- 
Richard Light

Received on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 08:09:36 UTC