ISSUE-49: Is a graph an information resource

ISSUE-49: Is a graph an information resource

http://www.w3.org/2009/sparql/track/issues/49

Raised by: Kjetil Kjernsmo
On product: 

SPARQL 1.0 states that the graph URI does not point to a information resource. The consequences of this needs to be explored particularly for the HTTP protocol update.

This issue has been discussed on the mailing list, see e.g. 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-rdf-dawg/2009OctDec/0105.html

httpRange-14, at http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/issues#httpRange-14 which is important to the semweb community and should therefore be taken as a normative reference for this group, states that 

  If an "http" resource responds to a GET request with a 2xx response, then the 
  resource identified by that URI is an information resource; 

Thus, it seems that a URI that identifies an information resource cannot be used as a graph URI, even when GETting that URI will result in that the same information content is returned.

Concretely, this seems to imply that if you have a document 
http://example.org/foo.rdf you cannot import this into a quad store with http://example.org/foo.rdf as the graph name, since it is an information resource. Moreover, if you did, you cannot return a 200 if has been imported, it would have to return a 303. 

This would add a lot of confusion and complexity.

Received on Tuesday, 20 October 2009 11:22:57 UTC