Re: INSEE releases OWL ontology and RDF data for geographical entities

Eric van der Vlist wrote:
> Le dimanche 06 août 2006 à 15:45 +0200, Hans Teijgeler a écrit : 
>> Please elaborate on what you exactly mean with that roundtrip.
> 
> If I understand the spec correctly, if you load a XML/RDF document with
> weird namespaces names such as http://foo.com/b or http://foo.com#b in a
> RDF parser and serialise the model back into XML/RDF, in addition to the
> common "roundtrip" issues, the result could use different namespace and
> local names than the original document!

What difference would that make (besides it possibly not looking as
pretty)?  The input and output documents will still be entirely equivalent.

Just to throw in my two cents into this thread, while I'm emailing
(although I don't expect to say anything no one has said before) --

It seems like issues about # versus /, choosing good namespace URIs, and
dereferencing are all very fragile issues.  As we are right now, we've
been told (by the specs, implicitly if not explicitly) that there's
nothing in a name.  They're supposed to be opaque.  So if I start
coining millions of http:-schemed names, I have an expectation that
tools *are not* going to bombard my server with millions of HTTP GETs
trying to find things because you're not *supposed* to look inside a URI.

If that's not what we want, that is, if there is any (formal) level of
expectation that http-URIs are intended both 1) to denote an entity and
2) to be potentially dereferencable to something, then the W3C better
say so very soon so I know that if I don't want millions of HTTP GETs, I
better not use http:.

In the meanwhile, until some standard says that http: URIs are expected
to be even potentially dereferencable, my feeling is that we should just
drop the idea that we can dereference anything unless some triple
explicitly says so.

(OTOH, I have been using tag: anyway because I find http: unnecessarily
confusing.)

-- 
- Joshua Tauberer

http://razor.occams.info

"Unfortunately, we're having this discussion. It's too bad,
because guess who listens to the discussion: the enemy."

Received on Sunday, 6 August 2006 14:59:46 UTC