Re: Is 303 really necessary?

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Ian Davis <me@iandavis.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The subject of this email is the title of a blog post I wrote last
> night questioning whether we actually need to continue with the 303
> redirect approach for Linked Data. My suggestion is that replacing it
> with a 200 is in practice harmless and that nothing actually breaks on
> the web. Please take a moment to read it if you are interested.
>
> http://iand.posterous.com/is-303-really-necessary

In a purely personal capacity, I like the approach of just using 200,
i.e. with RDFa or whatever, rather than 303. If we want to
disambiguate URIs, the IRW ontology [1] offers a nice class called
"nonInformationResource" and "InformationResource" that one can use to
disambiguate. See this paper [2] on "an Ontology of Resources for
Linked Data" for a walk-through example.

My reasoning is not architectural, but simply efficiency. It is rather
inefficient to have a redirection in the form of a 303 if one can get
the same info without using 303.

Note that Microsoft's oData may one day be a serious competitor to
Linked Data, and if you asked many programmers and open data people
who are not already committed to RDF if they would use Atom + HTTP GET
and no redirects over RDF/XML and a weird 303 redirect, I think the
answer would be rather self-evident.

[1]http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/web/irw.owl
[2]http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2009/papers/ldow2009_paper19.pdf



>
> Cheers,
>
> Ian
>
>

Received on Thursday, 4 November 2010 16:34:09 UTC