Re: Explaining the benefits of http-range14 (was Re: [HTTP-range-14] Hyperthing: Semantic Web URI Validator (303, 301, 302, 307 and hash URIs) )

Hi,

On 20 October 2011 13:25, Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Leigh Dodds <leigh.dodds@talis.com> wrote:
>> So, can we turn things on their head a little. Instead of starting out
>> from a position that we *must* have two different resources, can we
>> instead highlight to people the *benefits* of having different
>> identifiers? That makes it more of a best practice discussion and one
>> based on trade-offs: e.g. this class of software won't be able to
>> process your data correctly, or you'll be limited in how you can
>> publish additional data or metadata in the future.
>>
>> I don't think I've seen anyone approach things from that perspective,
>> but I can't help but think it'll be more compelling. And it also has
>> the benefits of not telling people that they're right or wrong, but
>> just illustrate what trade-offs they are making.
>
> I agree Leigh. The argument that you can't deliver an entity like a
> Galaxy to someone's browser sounds increasingly hollow to me. Nobody
> really expects that, and the concept of a Representation from
> WebArch/REST explains it away to most technical people. Plus, we now
> have examples in the wild like OpenGraphProtocol that seem to be
> delivering drinks, politicians, hotels, etc to machine agents at
> Facebook just fine.

It's the arrival of the OpenGraphProtocol which I think warrants a
more careful discussion. It seems to me that we no longer have to try
so hard to convince people that giving things de-referencable URIs
that return useful data. It's happening now, and there's immediate and
obvious benefit, i.e. integration with facebook, better searching
ranking, etc.

> But there does seem to be a valid design pattern, or even refactoring
> pattern, in httpRange-14 that is worth documenting.

Refactoring is how I've been thinking about it too. i.e. under what
situations might you want to have separate URIs for its resource and
its description? Dave Reynolds has given some good examples of that.

> Perhaps a good
> place would be http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/? I think
> positioning httpRange-14 as a MUST instead of a SHOULD or MAY made a
> lot of sense to get the LOD experiment rolling. It got me personally
> thinking about the issue of identity in a practical way as I built web
> applications, that I probably wouldn't otherwise have otherwise done.
> But it would've been easier if grappling with it was optional, and
> there were practical examples of where it is useful, instead of having
> it be an issue of dogma.

My personal viewpoint is that it has to be optional, because there's
already a growing set of deployed examples of people not doing it (OGP
adoption), so how can we help those users understand the pitfalls
and/or the benefits of a slightly cleaner approach. We can also help
them understand how best to publish data to avoid mis-interpretation.

Simplify ridiculously just to make a point, we seem to have the
following situation:

* Create de-referencable URIs for things. Describe them with OGP
and/or Schema.org
Benefit: Facebook integration, SEO

* Above plus addition # URIs or 303s.
Benefit: ability to make some finer-grained assertions in some
specific scenarios. Tabulator is happy

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Product Lead, Kasabi
Mobile: 07850 928381
http://kasabi.com
http://talis.com

Talis Systems Ltd
43 Temple Row
Birmingham
B2 5LS

Received on Friday, 21 October 2011 06:57:12 UTC