Re: Self-descriptive assertions

Mark Baker wrote:

> 
>>What (I think) would be bad would be assuming/believing that the sender
>>meant to send with media-type application/rdf+xml.
> 
> 
> True, but why is that bad?  I believe it's because - as I said above -
> that the recipient would believe that the sender is trying to
> communicate the graph.
> 

But the whole point is that the sender has no say in how the recipient 
chooses to process the representation.  Maybe I want to get an example 
of application/rdf+xml to illustrate an article I am writing.  Maybe I 
want to extract certain information using xslt and never need to form 
triples.  Maybe I want to apply some non-RDF processing as I build the 
graph.  Maybe I want to somehow canonicalize the data and end up with a 
different (but we hope equivalent) one.  Maybe I have a quad system and 
want to load the RDF into quad statements.

Or maybe I want to do what you think I ought to do.

So the only area we can have a reasonable hope of working with here is 
what the _sender_ may have wanted to communicate beyond the actual data 
contained in the application/rdf+xml representation.

Now, the sender _may_ be wanting you to think "Yea, verily, this 
information is true, and I _am_ expecting everyone to apply RDF 
interpretation rules to it", but there are many other possibilities.

Cheers,

Tom P

Received on Thursday, 25 March 2004 14:14:11 UTC