Associating EARL with a page

Hi folks,

this is clearly a topic we need to think about. It's actually pretty mch a  
general RDF question, not specific to EARL.

There are a few ways that we can connect EARL to the page it is about.  
Most of the obvious ones are, I think, not very good because they involve  
relying on the author of a page, and I think in many many use cases where  
people will want to find EARL it will be whenthe author hasn't created or  
linked to it.

This is the reason why I would not go very heavily down the path of using  
HTML's link with something like rel="meta", nor a URIQA server (an  
extended HTTP server that will store and return metadata for any resource  
as special methods), although both of those are reasonable options for  
authors to use and are not bad as such.

It's also one reason I don't like the idea of a "well-known-location"  
convention, such as storing EARL in an /earl directory or something. I  
also dislike that for other reasons and think it is a bad idea.

For the rest of us third party evaluators, it would be helpful to have  
somewhere to put EARL and for the rest of us EARL consumers it would be  
nice to have somewhere to look for it. Eric Prud'hommeaux said at the face  
to face that his new annotea server should be able to handle EARL quite  
happily - it's a server you configure that receives and serves RDF. There  
are various other RDF servers around, too. And the nice thing is that soon  
if you send any of them a query written in SPARQL, you should find out  
what they know.

I actually have an informal action item to follow this up with EricP -  
apparently he needs to see an example query to configure his server, so  
here is an attempt at one for the current spec that asks for anything  
about an assertion where the assertion has 6 basic properties (The  
OPTIONAL stuff at the end is the attempt to gather all the other info. It  
is the part I am least sure of):

PREFIX earl: <http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/EARL/nmg-strawman#>
PREFIX dc:   <http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/>

SELECT ?subject, ?test, ?result, ?assertor, ?date, ?mode, ?some, ?more,  
?spare, ?stuff

WHERE
   ( earl:Assertion earl:assertedBy ?assertor )
   ( earl:Assertion earl:result ?result )
   ( earl:Assertion earl:subject ?subject )
   ( earl:Assertion dc:date ?date )
   ( earl:Assertion earl:mode ?mode )
   ( earl:Assertion earl:testCase ?test )
OPTIONAL {
   ( earl:Assertion ?spare ?stuff )
   OPTIONAL
     ( ?stuff ?some ?more )
}

If I have the query right, this will pretty much tell you anything known  
about any Assertion that has some value for each of the 6 basic properties  
I have noted. There are no constraints - I will start a seperate thread on  
querying EARL, because I think this should be noted in the technical spec  
and explained in the tutorial one...

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                      Fundacion Sidar
charles@sidar.org   +61 409 134 136    http://www.sidar.org

Received on Sunday, 10 April 2005 07:20:11 UTC