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

On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Nathan, hello.
>
> It's NIR that's of interest to this discussion, but there's no way of indicating within HTTP that a resource is in that set [1], only that something is in IR.

The important distinction, I think, is not between one kind of
resource and another, but between the manner in which a URI comes to
be associated with a resource. Terminology is helpful, which is why
people have latched onto "NIR", and one possibility is "direct" (for
old-fashioned Web URIs) and "indirect" (for semweb / linked data),
applied not to resources but to URIs.

A direct URI always names an IR (in fact a particular one: the one at
that URI), but an indirect one can name either an NIR or an IR (as in
the http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2011/09/referential-use.html, and as
deployed at http://dx.doi.org/ ). HR14a says (in effect) all
retrieval-enabled hashless URIs are direct, but other rules (like Ian
Davis's) might say other things; the terms are useful independent of
the architecture.

There might be situations in which 'NIR' is a useful category, but I
don't know of any. If you say things like "303 implies NIR" (which is
not justified by httpRange-14 or anything else), you get into trouble
with indirectly named IRs like those at dx.doi.org.

One could adopt a new rule that says an indirect URI cannot name an
IR, in which case if you knew the IR/NIR classification you could know
which kind of URI you had to use and vice versa, but this seems
limiting, unnecessary, and incompatible.

Jonathan

Received on Friday, 21 October 2011 13:47:00 UTC