Re: BioRDF: URI Best Practices

Nice idea. I've added a similar proposal to the same wiki page[1].

Basically, I would  argue that there are three aspects to  
dereferencing, with the problem being that there is no one thing that  
you always want dereferencing to get you.

  1. The kind of information you want to get by dereferencing - You  
might want the primary data if it is an information resource. You might  
want metadata of various kinds in all cases (definition, policy,  
history, picture-of).  303 notwithstanding, I'd rather know that I am  
dealing with a non-information resource *before* I touch the network.
  2. The representation type - I think this is handled by mime types
  3. The transport - http etc.

So my proposal suggests a class that defines ways of transforming the  
URI you find in a SW document into URLs that get specific types of  
information. The fact that a transform to URL is provided means you get  
the transport (because it is part of the transformed URL). Different  
properties of the class let you retrieve different patterns for  
different sorts of information (1.). The representation 2., is not  
explicitly represented, it should instead be part of the definitions of  
the properties. We typically want to know *before* we dereference, what  
we would get back.

I would further argue that as much as possible about this should be  
represented explicitly in your ontology, as Matthias has suggested.

There's more to elaborate about such a proposal and details to work  
out, but I think, for instance, that it can handle the LSID use cases.

[1]  
http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG_BioRDF_Subgroup/Tasks/ 
URI_Best_Practices/Use_Cases

On Jul 20, 2006, at 8:07 AM, Matthias Samwald wrote:

>
> On the page
> http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG_BioRDF_Subgroup/Tasks/ 
> URI_Best_Practices/Use_Cases
> I have written that an "ontology of resolvable resources" would be  
> practical in some cases.
>
> I have created such a small ontology, it can be downloaded / imported  
> from
> http://neuroscientific.net/ont/resolvable.owl
>
> cheers,
> Matthias
>
>

Received on Friday, 21 July 2006 14:31:59 UTC