- From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
- Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:25:02 -0400
- To: Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Cc: Richard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>, Alan Ruttenberg <alanruttenberg@gmail.com>, Linked Data community <public-lod@w3.org>, Michael Hausenblas <michael.hausenblas@deri.org>
On Sat, 2011-06-11 at 16:51 -0700, Pat Hayes wrote:
[ . . . ]
> Well, I am sympathetic to not defending HTTP-range-14 [ . . . ] but if
> so then we really ought to be doing that re-thinking in the RDF WG
> right now, surely?
Let's be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath. The
httpRange-14 rule is *fine*. It is valuable, and should *not* be
discarded. The problem only comes in attempting to *universally* assert
that the class of "information resource" (or foaf:Document) is disjoint
with anything else, such as by baking such a disjointness assertion into
the RDF specification or a TAG finding or the FOAF spec or similar.
In other words, suppose the W3C codifies the httpRange-14 rule as
something like this, and this rule is universally adopted:
{ ... ?r awww:yieldsHttpResponseCode 200 . }
=> { ?r a awww:InformationResource . } .
A rule like this would be great to standardize, and I and others have
made baby steps toward drafting what such a rule might look like. But
the important thing is that awww:InformationResource *not* be
universally declared as disjoint with anything. Rather, think of it as
a marker class:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marker_interface_pattern
It carries very little semantics in and of itself, but it provides an
important hook for attaching semantics downstream that particular
applications may need. *Some* of those applications may need to declare
awww:InformationResource disjoint with foaf:Person, while others will
work fine allowing them to be conflated.
--
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/
Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.
Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2011 00:38:58 UTC