Re: Change Proposal for HttpRange-14

Tim,

On 25 Mar 2012, at 20:26, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> For example, To take an arbitrary one of the trillions out there, what does 
> http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11
>  identify, there being no RDF in it?
> What can I possibly do with that URI if the publisher has not explicitly allowed me to use it
> to refer to the online book, under your proposal?

I don't know about anyone else, but I am getting increasingly confused by your use of this example.

What is it that you want to be able to do?

Is it that you want to be able to use http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=1 to refer to the book Moby Dick?

You can't do that currently. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11 is a web page, not a book. Just because

 1. The book Moby Dick is a book and therefore is an information resource.
 2. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11 returns a 200 therefore http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11 is an information resource.
 3. http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11 shows a bit of the book Moby Dick.

it does not follow that http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11 refers to the book Moby Dick. Do you think it does?


Of course you could, currently, in some RDF that you own assert something like:

  <#me> 
    :like <http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11> ;
    .

  <http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11>
    a bibo:Book ;
    dct:title "Moby Dick" ;
    .

and therefore state that you mean http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11 to refer to the book Moby Dick, rather than specifically page 11 of the Project Gutenberg version, but whether anyone else would use that same URL to refer to the book, or trust your assertions about that URL, is a purely social question.

Under the proposal that we've put forward, you can still make those assertions in your own RDF if you want, and consumers will still trust them or not as they wish. The only thing that changes is that consumers can't make the assumption that just because http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11 returns a 200 it's an information resource, but you haven't required that assumption to make your assertions about http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2372108&pageno=11, so I really don't see how that would affect anything that you're doing.

Cheers,

Jeni
-- 
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com

Received on Monday, 26 March 2012 08:02:41 UTC