Re: What would break? Re: httpRange-14

On 3/26/12 3:22 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Kingsley Idehen<kidehen@openlinksw.com>  wrote:
>> On 3/26/12 2:09 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:
>>> Hi Kingsley,
>>>
>>> On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Kingsley Idehen<kidehen@openlinksw.com>
>>>   wrote:
>>>> ...
>>>> Leigh,
>>>>
>>>> Everything we've built in the Linked Data realm leverages the findings of
>>>> HttpRange-14 re. Name/Address (Reference/Access) disambiguation. Our
>>>> Linked
>>>> Data clients adhere to these findings. Our Linked Data servers do the
>>>> same.
>>> By "we" I assume you mean OpenLink. Here's where I asked the original
>>> question [1]. Handily Ian Davis published an example resource that
>>> returns a 200 OK when you de-reference it [2].
>> Support was done (basically reusing our old internal redirection code)
>> whenever that post was made by Ian.
>>
>>> I just tested that in URI Burner [3] and it gave me broadly what I'd
>>> expect, i.e. the resources mentioned in the resulting RDF. I didn't
>>> see any visible breakage. Am I seeing fall-back behaviour?
>>
>> As per comment above its implemented. We have our own heuristic for handling
>> self-describing resources. My concern is that what we've done isn't the norm
>> i.e., I don't see others working that way, instinctively. You have to be
>> over the Linked Data comprehension hump to be in a position emulate what
>> we've done.
> OK, I thought you might have done, so thanks for the confirmation. But
> this further demonstrates that we don't necessarily need redirects.

No, no...

That isn't a case for invalidating 303 redirection. It simply proves 
that a different heuristic could be applied to the handling of slash 
URIs that identify description (or descriptor) document subjects. The 
only issue with the heuristic (a dog-fooding exercise) is that it 
heightens rather than simplifies entry into the realm of Linked Data.

Linked Data (as per TimBL's meme) straddles a very delicate balance 
between what's already in the Web i.e., lots of named documents that 
loosely 'mention' many named entities  and what should increasingly be 
added to the Web i.e., lots of named documents that explicitly describe 
unambiguously named subjects (entities).  The challenge is pulling this 
off unobtrusively.

When someone refers to me on the Web via my blog home page, they aren't 
in anyway inferring that I am a Web page, they make a human 
comprehensible inference at the point when they make that claim. The 
same applies to the read of the Web document that holds that reference.  
For this to work at the machine-to-machine level there has to be machine 
level disambiguation which is what you get via 303 redirection for this 
specific slash URI scenario en route to similar inference.  What I just 
described isn't really delivered with the same degree of unobtrusiveness 
following a 200 OK for a subject that isn't an Web document, there is 
additional indirection in play, it just doesn't happen over the wire, 
but introduces a cost all the same on two fronts:

1. encourages people to identity description subjects ambiguously
2. force people to understand relation semantics en route to exploiting 
Linked Data.

Now, for a Semantic Web proper solution, the 303 alternative is much 
more natural since in this particular scenario the clients and servers 
are totally driven by relation semantics.

To conclude, Linked Data is a vital stepping stone (ground zero so to 
speak) en route to the Semantic Web nirvana. It isn't the Semantic Web 
in all its potential glory. It sits between coarse-grained structured 
data and fine-grained structured data woven together via semantically 
rich relations, leveraging hyperlinks.

There's a thin line here that's the root of this permathread :-)
>
>>> ....
>>> Are people really testing status codes and changing subsequent
>>> processing behaviour because of that? It looks like there's little or
>>> no breakage in Sindice for example [3].
>>>
>>> Based on Tim's comments he has been doing that, are other people doing
>>> the same? And if you have to ask if we're not, then who is this ruling
>>> benefiting?
>> We do the same, but we also go beyond (i.e., what you call a fall-back).
> Would you care to elaborate on that? i.e: what inferences are you
> deriving from the protocol interaction?

Meaning, we have a fallback. Basically, we look at the Content-Location: 
header as I described in an old post [1].

>
> I can see that for a .txt document you are inferring that its a
> foaf:Document [1].
>
> I'm still also interested to hear from others.
>
> [1]. http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/about/html/http/www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76.txt

Links:

1. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Nov/0237.html -- 
heuristic explained
2. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Nov/0258.html -- 
ditto.


Kingsley
>
> Cheers,
>
> L.
>
>


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder&  CEO
OpenLink Software
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