Re: Is 303 really necessary?

On 11/4/10 12:33 PM, Harry Halpin wrote:
> 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.

Yes, and a valid reason for making your choice :-) But as you state 
clearly, it remains a choice with regards to preferred technique.

All:

Where is the pointer (or URL) for a document that mandates 303's? The 
sense here being: 303 redirection as the only technique for delivering 
HTTP based Resolvable Names re. Linked Data.

> 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.

Microsoft doesn't see OData as Linked Data (the concept) competition. 
They see it as an alternative format for representing Linked Data via 
E-A-V model graphs :-) As you can see, in this universe of ours, 
everything is connected, nothing exist in absolute isolation.

Some key points re. OData;

1. It models electronic records rather than real world objects
2. OData modeling ultimately matches any modeling that fails to 
distinguish a Web Resource from a Real World Object (any Entity that 
exists in some form outside the Web medium) via fixation -- overt or 
inadvertent -- on two-thirds of the Referent, Identifier, Resource trinity.

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

Links:

1. http://dbpedia.org/page/Paris -- notice OData and friends (Atom or 
JSON variants) in the footer of this HTML+RDFa resource
2. http://dbpedia.org/describe/?uri=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris
3. http://uriburner.com/describe/?uri=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris 
-- Ditto
4. 
http://dbpedia-live.openlinksw.com/describe/?uri=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris 
-- Ditto
5. 
http://lod.openlinksw.com/describe/?uri=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris -- 
Ditto .
>
>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Ian
>>
>>
>


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen

Received on Thursday, 4 November 2010 19:13:23 UTC