Re: adding hypermedia to spatial data best practices

hello rob.

one thing may be good to keep in mind. you say:

On 2015-07-28 22:38 , Rob Atkinson wrote:
> Personally, I think the relationship between "data" and "hyperlinking"
> needs some greater care.  In a self-contained database, relationships
> are a first-class concern - however there is a prevalence in the linked
> data world of using ad-hoc approaches to generating hyperlinks - for
> example using owl:sameAs to link to an interactive mapping application
> via geographical coordinates. using very general link semantics
> "rdf:seeAlso" for links to related data is another common pattern. The
> lack of a demonstrably good practice is fairly hard to reconcile with
> any potential to be able to use such links in any automated fashion, so
> the development of best practice discussion and exemplar resources is an
> important step to take. fortunately, the Linked Data web is still tiny
> compared to the problem space, so there is not a huge amount invested in
> sub-optimal approaches.

it seems that most comments come from a linked data perspective. that's 
fine, but as you say, that's a tiny percentage of what's currently going 
on on the web, and what's probably going to be on the web for the 
foreseeable future. and there's an interesting difference:

- in linked data, formal link semantics (and tightly defined semantics) 
are a least a goal, even though they may not always be as well-defined 
as one might want.

- on the web, link semantics are purposefully very loose, so that link 
relationship types can be reused. what matters then is how those fuzzy 
semantics are used *in the context of a given service*. this is very 
different (and intentionally so) from the linked data goal of defining 
and then using context-free meaning that can be used globally outside of 
a well-defined scope.

now, whether one prefers the first or the second approach of "defining 
link semantics" is an interesting question in itself (both with 
interesting challenges and implications), but not something i want to 
discuss here. but it would be great to see that if something claimed to 
be best practices for the web (and not just RDF-based models), that it 
would be inclusive in terms of embracing both approaches.

> I think a "star" that matters is missing - which is to make the meaning
> of hyperlinks explicit and discoverable - this is far more useful than
> putting the data into RDF per se, but one could argue thats the
> underlying intent of using RDF, in that such links have URIs for link
> predicates - and there is an implication regarding what those URIs
> should resolve to.  Maybe there is some good practice out there
> somewhere of how to hyperlink without losing information or adding more
> noise to the system we could point to - but I haven't seen one in the
> geospatial domain.

if you just talk about the web, then all that web architecture requires 
is to make links explicit, and link relation types as well, so that 
those links are typed and can be traversed by clients. i guess i should 
add "use (explicitly or implicitly) typed links" to star number four in 
the web data principles...

https://github.com/dret/webdata

cheers,

dret.

-- 
erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
            | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
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Received on Saturday, 1 August 2015 00:42:12 UTC