Re: BioRDF: URI Best Practices

On Jul 21, 2006, at 10:59 AM, Chimezie Ogbuji wrote:

> As Xiaoshu pointed out, content negotiation (specific accept headers 
> dispatched to a URL) give you *most* of this functionality purely at 
> the transport level - assuming there are appropriate mime types for 
> the representation you have in mind for a URL.

And assuming that you are using http. Despite my argument for them I 
don't expect they will be the only URI's in use.

Also, I've not much experience with content negotiation at the 
transport layer - do a lot of sites do it? Is it as easy to set up as 
responding to different URLs?

Also, mime types  tell you the format of the resource, but not the type 
of content. So compare a definition and a policy statement metadata for 
a uri. Both might be text/rdf+xml, no?

It seems to me that content negotiation is a pre-semantic web way of 
handling a bit of semantics. Why not adopt a uniform way of handling 
these things? You could certainly support content negotiation 
discovered information by translating it to to the more expressive 
rdf/owl.

-Alan

>
> So, it would seem more useful for such a class to identify 1) whether 
> a URI is a resolvable resource and 2) the mime-types it is 
> 'registered' to respond to - perhaps with some human-readable 
> annotation documenting exactly what is expected from a particular 
> mime-type.  Where there is only one associated representation for a 
> URL, it is sufficient to simply identify the URI as a resolvable 
> identifier and for a client to do a GET without any accept headers 
> (since the lack of any registered mime-types indicates that the URL 
> only has one representation modality)
>
> I like the idea of guiding the dereferencing process in a formal way, 
> but I think content negotiation is the better 'hook' for retrieving 
> various representations of the same URL.
>
> I'll update the Wiki accordingly
>
> 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 Monday, 24 July 2006 03:51:19 UTC