[TED] The potential impact of the semantic Web best practices for publishing RDF vocabularies on the RIF mechanism for referencing RDF/OWL

I am writing this e-mail in fulfillment of action 370 and to report on
the potential impact of the semantic Web best practices for publishing
RDF vocabularies [1] on a future RIF mechanism for referring to RDF/OWL
graphs/ontologies, thereby resolving issue 2.


The semantic Web best practices note [1] on publishing RDF vocabularies
describes a number of minimal requirements as well as a number of
patterns describing how to publish RDF vocabularies and accompanying
HTML documents on a Web server.
The issues addressed in the document are related to choosing namespaces
for vocabularies and the impact of this choice on the configuration of a
Web server.
These things are all not terribly interesting for RIF, since we do not
really have to care about how to publish RDF documents.

We do care about how RDF is referenced and whether the RDF document can
in fact be found at this location. In fact, we assume that the reference
to the RDF document is a URI and that the RDF document can in fact be
found by dereferencing this URI.
The latter corresponds to a minimal requirement on semantic Web
applications formulated in [1]: the RDF graph/owl ontology can be found
by dereferencing the URI which denotes it.

So, [1] does not impact the design of the RIF mechanism for referring to
RDF graphs.


Best, Jos


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/