Re: Inheritance

Hans Teijgeler wrote:

snip

> 
> As to the browser subject: I read, much to my surprise, in Appendix A of the
> Primer: "...RDF uses URIrefs only to identify things, while browsers also
> use URIrefs to retrieve things." I was surprised, because why on earth would
> you use a "Resource Description" Framework without being able to find that
> description? So, a browser should be able to find the resource at its URI,
> and then give me the information about that resource that I require. Again,
> too naïve, I guess. 
> 

You certainly want to be able to find the description.  RDF simply 
doesn't say anything about whether you can find it by dereferencing the 
URIref as a URL.  There's been (and continues to be) a lot of discussion 
about a generalized way to retrieve information about a given resource, 
since many people prefer not to confuse the name of the thing with the 
name of its description by using the same URIref for both.  After all, 
you may want to provide RDF descriptive information about the 
description itself.  For example, does the statement

ex:Volkswagen dc:creator ex:Frank .

say that Frank created the Volkswagen referred to by ex:Volkswagen, or 
that Frank created the descriptive information that you might be able to 
retrieve from ex:Volkswagen?

Since you said you've been working with XML, note that XML namespaces 
work in a similar way.  That is, an XML namespace is identified by a 
URIref, but there is no requirement that any kind of descriptive 
information about the namespace is retrievable at that URI.

--Frank

Received on Wednesday, 6 April 2005 15:24:35 UTC