Re: RDF-ISSUE-103 (dereferenceable-iris): Make dereferenceable IRIs a SHOULD in RDF Concepts [RDF Concepts]

Markus,

On 6 Nov 2012, at 12:57, Markus Lanthaler wrote:
> I would be even happier
> if the sentence "A good way of communicating the intended referent to the
> world is to set up the IRI so that it dereferences [WEBARCH] to such a
> document" could be reformulated to a non-norminative recommendation. I find
> it important to give developers clear recommendations they can make use of
> without having to dig really deep.

I think you misunderstand the purpose of RDF Concepts.

It defines a data model that is the shared foundation for a number of other specifications, including RDF syntaxes, query languages, formal semantics, vocabulary definition languages, and so forth.

Its purpose is to make it so that the mechanisms defined in all of these specifications can operate on the same data.

For most of these specifications, it doesn't matter whether URIs dereference. The things that matter are things like whether the URIs are absolute or relative, whether they may or may not contain characters outside of US-ASCII, whether language tags are case-sensitive, whether blank nodes can be shared between graphs, whether URI normalization happens before URIs are compared for equality, and so on. That's the stuff that RDF Concepts defines.

There's some 20 or so W3C specs that depend on RDF Concepts, and dozens of further specs outside of W3C. Most of them don't need to care whether the URIs in RDF graphs dereference; it's an orthogonal concern. Best practice for using the data model doesn't belong into the definition of the data model, because it just adds confusion for all the other specifications that rely on that foundation.

If you want to give clear recommendations to developers, then write a tutorial! A data model definition isn't the place for advocacy.

Best,
Richard

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2012 15:03:41 UTC