Re: RDFa Use Cases

2009/2/17 Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>:

>> > My understanding was that people wanted RDF data to be persisted
>> > across multiple sessions, which would lead to bad data "poisoning the
>> > well" in a way that no other feature in Web browsers has yet had to
>> > deal with.
>>
>> Some people do, some don't. I think we should assume that the RDF triple
>> store may be more akin to the browser cache (can be cleared on a whim)
>> than to a traditional database (clearing the data is bad).

Agreed. I believe this is a general point - a triplestore, virtually
*any* triplestore is just a cache of a chunk of the Semantic Web, in
the same fashion a Web cache contains a chunk of the Web.

> If we allow any persistence without some solution to the trust/spam
> problem, the store will quickly become useless (in the same way that the
> various features to open a new window quickly became useless once sites
> found ways to use them for doing popup ads).

I think it's premature to start addressing such a problem before it arises.
A per-page triplestore is no different than per-page HTML caching,
though to be more useful we should expect data merging, so in that
sense the situation is qualitatively different. Right now we can only
speculate on the kind of harm vectors that might appear.

Incidentally I'm reminded of a (quite probably spurious) anecdote I
heard: when it was suggested that browsers display images, timbl
responded by saying it'll only lead to people publishing porn. True or
not, we know what happened. But it would be hard to argue that the
ability to display images is a bad thing.

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Wednesday, 18 February 2009 11:54:24 UTC