RE: BioRDF: URI Best Practices

On Fri, 21 Jul 2006, Xiaoshu Wang wrote:

> To discribe if an IR has multiple representations is different from to
> describe if it is IR or non-IR. Let's not mess this two up.  The former is
> useful.  For instance, if a data is available in XHTML, WML, word, PDF, etc.
> Then we can further use the content negotiation to further retrieve the
> resources if using the same URI.  Or use different URIs to represent
> different types/versions of representations.

Right, and it's precisely in this scenario where it would be quite useful 
to setup a 'mapping' from the single URI to multiple URLs, but this should 
be a second option to using content-negotiation against a single URL.

> But it will be useless to
> classify IR vs. non-IR. Of course, you can develop ontology and use it to
> describe it, it just won't offer much help.
>
>> 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.
>
> I would also be cautious about that.  This seems to be similar to what the
> web service is doing.  I hope we don't try to reinvent the wheel, especially
> it isn't a small wheel to invent by any means.

I can understand the caution and the same red flag was raised in my 
mind with this suggestion, but I guess it would help to ask if there are any specific 
situations where mime-types are not sufficient enough to describe 
'unambigously' the representation modalities for a single URL.  It seems 
this is the exact purpose they were set out to serve.  The only situation 
I could think of is in trying to resolve the defining ontology of a URI, 
but if you first attempt to dereference it as RDF content (with 
application/rdf+xml,text/rdf+n3 in the accept header), the resulting set 
of triples should include a rdfs:isDefinedBy statement associating the URI
with it's defining ontology (if such an ontology exists).

Chimezie Ogbuji
Lead Systems Analyst
Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
9500 Euclid Avenue/ W26
Cleveland, Ohio 44195
Office: (216)444-8593
ogbujic@ccf.org

Received on Friday, 21 July 2006 15:59:04 UTC