Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

Michael and all, greetings.

On 2012 Mar 25, at 14:19, Michael Brunnbauer wrote:

> Perhaps the default IR assumption be saved by saying that a 200 URI <X> is a 
> IR as long as we don't find some triple at X that suggests otherwise. Why not a
> NIR class ? If the concept of IRs/NIRs is sufficiently unambiguous to talk
> about it in natural language (I think it is), we can talk about it in RDF.

I confess I haven't kept fully up with the details of this suddenly rampant thread, but this suggestion is the one I associate with Ian Davis back in the 'Is 303 really necessary?' thread of November 2010 (that long ago!?).

One can characterise this as 'httpRange-14 is defeasible', or, as a procedure:

vvvv
After a client has extracted all of the 'authoritative' statements about a resource X, which is retrieved with a 200 status, it rfc2119-should add the triple 'X a eg:InformationResource', unless this would create a contradiction.
^^^^

Why would this create a contradiction?  The resource X might explicitly say that it is a eg:NonInformationResource; it might be declared to be a eg:Book, which is here or elsewhere declared to be subClassOf eg:NonInformationResource; or X might be in the domain or range of a property which indicates that it is a non-IR, such as for example :describedBy.

What's 'extracted'?  That could include RDF+conneg, or RDFa, or some semi-formal microformats-based process, or anything you like.

What's 'authoritative'?  That's to some extent up to the client, but it would sensibly be the list of statements 200-retrieved from the resource itself.

That seems to include the practice described by Jeni's change request, and so inherit its advantages.  It avoids telling anyone they're Doing It Wrong, with a 200 NIR resource.  If someone at present describes a NIR with a 200 response, they can 'fix' that with a simple one-triple addition.  Also, it leaves it entirely up to the resource owner to decide how many URIs they wish to maintain, and which one documents which.

I'm sure most RDF descriptions of NIRs already do implicitly declare that they are NIRs.

This overall seems to be the intent behind the :isdescribedby proposal.  Is that correct?

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK

Received on Sunday, 25 March 2012 15:39:31 UTC