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

On 27.05.2010 15:51, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
> On 27 May 2010, at 10:47, Angelo Veltens wrote:
>> What I am going to implement is this: 
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/#r303uri
>>
>> I think, this is the way dbpedia works and it seems a good solution 
>> for me.
>
> It's the way DBpedia works, but it's by far the worst solution of the 
> three presented in the document.
>
> 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?

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?

>
> 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.

Kind regards and thanks for your patience,
Angelo

Received on Monday, 31 May 2010 09:33:20 UTC