Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

On 24/03/12 04:47, Pat Hayes wrote:
> I am sympathetic, but...
>
> On Mar 23, 2012, at 9:59 AM, Dave Reynolds wrote:
>
>> On 23/03/12 14:33, Pat Hayes wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mar 23, 2012, at 8:52 AM, Jonathan A Rees wrote:
>>>
>>>> I am a bit dismayed that nobody seems to be picking up on the point
>>>> I've been hammering on (TimBL and others have also pointed it out),
>>>> that, as shown by the Flickr and Jamendo examples, the real issue is
>>>> not an IR/NIR type distinction, but rather a distinction in the
>>>> *manner* in which a URI gets its meaning, via instantiation (of some
>>>> generic IR) on the one hand, vs. description (of *any* resource,
>>>> perhaps even an IR) on the other. The whole
>>>> information-resource-as-type issue is a total red herring, perhaps the
>>>> most destructive mistake made by the httpRange-14 resolution.
>>>
>>> +1000. There is no need for anyone to even talk about "information resources". The important point about http-range-14, which unfortunately it itself does not make clear, is that the 200-level code is a signal that the URI *denotes* whatever it *accesses* via the HTTP internet architecture.
>>
>> Quite, and this signal is what the change proposal rejects.
>>
>> The proposal is that URI X denotes what the publisher of X says it denotes, whether it returns 200 or not.
>
> And what if the publisher simply does not say anything about what the URi denotes? After all, something like 99.999% of the URIs on the planet lack this information. What, if anything, can be concluded about what they denote? The http-range-14 rule provides an answer to this which seems reasonably intuitive. What would be your answer? Or do you think there should not be any 'default' rule in such cases?

Seems entirely reasonable to me to adopt a default that such URIs indeed 
simply denote web pages.  The proposed-to-be-proposed-edit doesn't 
preclude doing that, or indeed including that in any best-practice advice.

Though my personal advice to people wanting to talk about undocumented 
3rd party URIs, with or without this change, is to be clear on the 
assumptions you are making. So if I want to make some statement about a 
page W (that has no associated RDF) then in my "aboutW" page I might 
include statements like:

      <W> a foaf:Document;  dct:title "I'm a web page at W"@en .
or
      :anon foaf:workplaceHomepage <W> .


BTW the fact that AFAIK there is no broadly used URI for the class of 
IRs (causing me to use foaf:Document in the above) may indicate how 
frequently people do in fact make the httpRange-14 inference in a way 
that is accessible to the rest of the stack.

Dave

Received on Saturday, 24 March 2012 10:20:50 UTC