Re: thoughts and some refs about AFS-2 UC (simplicity, minimalism )

On Mar 22, 2004, at 16:46, ext Alberto Reggiori wrote:

>>>
>>>> (b) a standard definition of a concise bounded description of a 
>>>> resource
>>>> (c) a standardized means to request the concise bounded description 
>>>> of a
>>>>      specific resource
>>>
>>> The matter of "concise bounded description"s should be an orthogonal 
>>> issue
>>> to the general form of query and of protocol.  That is, it would be 
>>> good if
>>> it did not need to be distinguished in the rec.
>
> I would rather agree with Andy here instead

>
>> I don't agree.
>>
>> Unless you are intending to restrict query responses solely to
>> bindings (which I think is both unnecessary and fails to meet
>> the needs of a very broad range of use cases that we've already
>> identified) you need to define what a "description" is.
>
> I do not think so - I rather would find such a requirement quite 
> restrictive

???

How so? Can you give some clear use cases where having a precise
definition of a resource description prevents some key functionality?

>
>> I don't think it should be left up to each implementor to define
>> themselves what they will consider a description (such as is the
>> case with Joseki's 'fetch' operation) but that there should be
>> consistency across implementations insofar as the default, normal
>> behavior of DAWG conformant tools. Implementations may choose to
>> offer other flavors of descriptions, fine, but we really do need
>> to have a precise, standardized definition of a "concise bounded
>> resource description".
>
> even though that would be too much "application specific" - while we 
> should try to be completely "opaque" on the "about" definition IMO


So one implementor has a minimal definition, which excludes any
statements with bnode subjects as well as all reification statements
(providing too little information in the response even though that
knowledge is there in the knowledge store) and another implementor
has a maximal definition which includes up to 5 levels deep descriptions
of other URI denoted resources "just in case" such information is needed
(providing far too much information, including knowledge which is not
directly relevant to the resource in question)...  No thanks.

I'm not proposing that an implementation is limited to returning
descriptions according to a standard definition, but that
having that standard definition as the default, unless otherwise
specified, allows clients to know what they will be getting
and that it will be the minimal, relevant body of information
about a resource.

Patrick

--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Tuesday, 23 March 2004 13:31:19 UTC