Re: URL +1, LSID -1

On Jul 11, 2007, at 3:20 AM, Eric Jain wrote:

> Alan Ruttenberg wrote:
>> from http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/alternatives-discovery.html
> >
>> [...]
>> While I'm not always a fan of TAG findings, I think this one makes  
>> a TON of sense.
>
> I'll agree with that, but where do they talk about having canonical  
> URIs for each specific representation?

Don't know - I didn't quote that part on purpose. I took canonical  
URI to mean "record without commitment to format".

> I understand well the need for representation-independant URIs, but  
> I don't see the use of a generic identifier for e.g. P12345 in  
> FASTA format: If you really wanted to make any statements about  
> that representation, you'd better attach them to the actual URL,  
> given that there are many ways to represent P12345 in FASTA format  
> (every server seems to do so differently).

Yup.

>>> Are there any standards/tools that know what to do with 303  
>>> responses?
>> Some. An influential tool by a certain Tim Berners Lee called  
>> Tabulator does. I've understood that it is considered a courtesy  
>> to respond 303 to things which are not gettable as such, and to  
>> provide information about related information, in this case the  
>> specifically formatted versions.
>
> I don't feel comfortable with showing a minimalistic page with some  
> weird acronyms when someone enters e.g. http://purl.uniprot.org/ 
> uniprot/P12345.

How is someone to know, then, that you mean that the name denotes a  
class of proteins, rather than a page of html?

> Ideally there would be a standard way for a client to request "what  
> representations are available". Perhaps I could return 303 if no  
> Accept header is set, don't know if that is a good idea?

I think content negotiation is a bad idea because it confuses the  
issue of what the name identifies. It effectively allows the GET to  
return many different things that *appear* to have the same name,  
because the bit that differentiates it (the accept header) has no  
representation in the rdf.

I think we should define, as a community, what sort of document we  
expect the 303 to redirect to (RDF) and what the contents of that RDF  
should be, e.g. minimally class, pointers to representations, where  
to get more information (e.g. endpoints).

Remember, most of this kind of information will eventually live at  
SPARQL endpoints. Providing this information is to enable discovery/ 
follow your nose navigation - which is inefficient, but polite.

-Alan

Received on Wednesday, 11 July 2007 07:32:29 UTC