Re: Cool URIs (was: Re: Java Framework for Content Negotiation)

Hi Angelo,

On 31 May 2010, at 10:32, Angelo Veltens wrote:
>> DBpedia has copied the approach from D2R Server. The person who  
>> came up with it and designed and implemented it for D2R Server is  
>> me. This was back in 2006, before the term Linked Data was even  
>> coined, so I didn't exactly have a lot of experience to rely on.  
>> With what I know today, I would never, ever again choose that  
>> approach. Use 303s if you must; but please do me a favour and add  
>> that generic document, and please do me a favour and name the  
>> different variants <foo.html> and <foo.rdf> rather than <page/foo>  
>> and <data/foo>.
>
> Thanks a lot for sharing your experience with me. I will follow your  
> advice. So if i'm going to implement what is described in section  
> 4.2. i have to
>
> - serve html at http://www.example.org/doc/alice if text/html wins  
> content negotiation and set content-location header to http://www.example.org/doc/alice.html
> - serve rdf/xml at http://www.example.org/doc/alice if application/ 
> rdf+xml wins content negotiation and set content-location header to http://www.example.org/doc/alice.rdf
> - serve html at http://www.example.org/doc/alice.html always
> - serve rdf/xml at http://www.example.org/doc/alice.rdf always
>
> Right?

Correct!

> By the way: Is there any defined behavior for the client, what to do  
> with the content-location information? Do Browsers take account of it?

Not really. It's generally recommended to put the format-specific URIs  
into the Content-Location header, but I don't think that clients  
really use that information much (neither in Linked Data nor in other  
contexts where content negotiation is used). So I'd still recommend  
using the header, but more important is perhaps to have the format- 
specific URIs linked from the HTML and RDF representations, so that  
users of the data -- both in the RDF form and in the HTML form -- can  
discover a URI where they can reliably retrieve a representation in a  
specific format.

>> The DBpedia guys are probably stuck with my stupid design forever  
>> because changing it now would break all sorts of links. But the  
>> thing that really kills me is how lots of newbies copy that design  
>> just because they saw it on DBpedia and therefore think that it  
>> must be good.
>
> I think the problem is not only, that dbpedia uses that design, but  
> that it is described in many examples as a possible or even "cool"  
> solution, e.g. http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/ 
>  (one of the first documents i stumbled upon)
>
> If we want to prevent people from using that design it should be  
> clarified that and why it is a bad choice.

Yes, that's a good point.

Best,
Richard



>
> Kind regards and thanks for your patience,
> Angelo

Received on Tuesday, 1 June 2010 18:17:41 UTC