Re: Datasets and contextual/temporal semantics

On 10/14/2011 12:42 PM, Sandro Hawke wrote:
> TimBL used to argue that those times should be understand as Valid-Since
> and Valid-Until times [1].  Given how they sit in the caching mechanism,
> they are perhaps closer to transaction times, but I think Tim's point
> was that one should try to align those sets of times anyway.
>
> Eventually he stopped pushing for this, when people told him that they
> were (a) too hard to control on their web servers, and (b) they want to
> be using them to control HTTP caching -- as intended -- not to be making
> claims about the world.
>
> This is why I suggested just putting the times in the data itself,

I agree with the sentiment that if dates and times of events are 
important then they should be explicitly modeled. My point about these 
HTTP header mechanisms is that it is basically obligatory on the web to 
participate in these cache control mechanisms and a lot of the anxiety 
about out-of-date data seems to me to be anxiety about our 
implementations that *do not check* to see whether our local copy of 
someone's foaf page is or is not up-to-date with the master copy on that 
person's web site, and is being misplaced as anxiety about the 
underlying specification in RDF Recommendations of a native time model.

Jeremy

Received on Friday, 14 October 2011 20:53:30 UTC