RE: BioRDF: URI Best Practices

-- Alan

> 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?

I am not sure what is your point here?  What do you mean "compare a
definition and a policy for a URI"?  How can you compare such things?      

> 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.

Content negotiation is not "pre-semantic web way".  You have to remember
semantic web is an extension of the current web, not a new web.  Per Godel's
incomplete theorem, there is no such thing of a completely self-descriptive
system, you have to build your system on certain foundation that cannot be
answered by the system.  I am just trying to help you not to waste your
time.  If you can come up with an approach that is generalized to all cases,
I am the first one to adopt it.  But if it is only a partial solution to a
few use cases, it becomes a "hack".  If it is a hack, there is a lot of
cheaper ways to do so.  For example, by social conventions and guess the
nature of URI.  Why goes to the extra miles of developing ontologies?

Xiaoshu

Received on Monday, 24 July 2006 13:34:34 UTC