Re: Squaring the HTTP-range-14 circle

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Dave Reynolds
<dave.e.reynolds@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-16 at 21:22 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
>
>> On 2011-06 -16, at 16:41, Ian Davis wrote:
>
>> > The problem here is that there are so few things that people want to
>> > say about web pages compared with the multitude of things they want to
>> > say about every other type of thing in existence.
>>
>> Well, that is a wonderful new thing.  For a long while it was difficult to
>> put data on the web, while there is quite a lot of metadata.
>> Wonderful idea that the semantic web may be beating the document
>> web hands down but that's not totally clear that we should trash the
>> use of URIs for use to refer to documents as do in the document web.
>
> I'm sure Ian wasn't claiming the data web is "beating" the document web
> and equally sure that you don't really think he was :)

Yes, absolutely.

>
> FWIW my experience is also that most of the data that people want to
> publish *in RDF* is about things rather than web pages. Clearly there
> *are* good use cases for capturing web page metadata in RDF but I've not
> seen that many in-the-wild cases where people wanted to publish data
> about *both* the web page and the thing.
>
> That's why Ian's "Back to Basics" suggestion works for me [as a fall
> back from "just use #"]. My interpretation is that, unlike most of this
> thread, it wasn't saying "use URIs ambiguously" but saying "the
> interpretation of the URI is up to the publisher and is discovered from
> the data not from the protocol response, it is legitimate to use a
> http-no-# URI to denote a thing if that is what you really want to do".
>

Yes, that's exactly what I am saying.


> Thus if I want to publish a table of e.g. population statistics at
> http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population then I can do so and use that
> URI within the RDF data as denoting the data set. As publisher I'm
> saying "this is a qb:DataSet not a web page, anything that looks like a
> web page when you point a browser at it is just a rendering related to
> that data and that rendering isn't being given a separate URI so you can
> talk about it, sorry about that".
>
>> If you use HTTP 200 for something different, then
>> you break my ability to look at a page, review it, and then
>> express my review in RDF,  using the page's URI as the identifier.
>
> Not quite. It is saying that you can't give a review for my
> http://foobar.gov.uk/datasets/population web page because the RDF
> returned by the URI says it denotes a dataset not the web page. You can
> still review the dataset itself. You can review other web pages which
> don't return RDF data saying they are something other than a web page.
>
> [As an aside, I would claim that most reviews are in fact about things -
> restaurants, books, music - not about the web pages.]
>

Quite. When a facebook user clicks the "Like" button on an IMDB page
they are expressing an opinion about the movie, not the page.

Ian

Received on Friday, 17 June 2011 12:52:07 UTC