Re: In defence of 404 ...

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 12:15 +0200, Bernard Vatant wrote:
> Dan
> 
> Out of your exchanges, Eric will certainly come out with a smart and 
> elegant solution for serving something else than 404 pages for the 
> various URIs in the namespace http://rdf.insee.fr/geo/, and (almost) 
> everybody and the TAG will be happy with it. Nevertheless, I would like 
> to go further in this discussion.
> 
> Don Connolly a écrit :
> > On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 23:53 +0200, Bernard Vatant wrote:
> > [...]
> >   
> >> And actually, this should be the general situation in SW publication :
> >> there is no authoritative, definitive, complete, description of a
> >> resource, packaged in one file, with a single access point.
> >>     
> >
> > Yes, there are authoritative descriptions in the Semantic Web.
> >   
> Yes, there are. But if you look at them, those are rather exceptions 
> than the general rule. When I write the *general situation*, it means 
> what it means : most resources can't have a *single* authoritative 
> description, for various reasons. More below.

Ah... I misread your point. Indeed, in the general case,
lots of documents may discuss the same resource, and none
of them is authoritative. If DOC1#T1 and DOC2#T1 both
refer to France, there is no web architecture mechanism
for determining which is authoritative.

The point I was making is there are authoritative descriptions
corresponding to URIs. Whatever whatever http responses
the owner of DOC1#T1 gives are authoritative descriptions
of DOC1#T1.

And yes, things change over time.

[...]
> > It seems very unnatural to me to use anything other than a single
> > static file for the case of an ontology with just a few dozen terms.
> > Maybe a handful of content-negotiated static files. But not more than
> > that.
> >
> >   
> Just a few dozen terms, yes. But with semantics not so "static" as you 
> would like them to be. geo:Region is not rdfs:subClassOf - The real 
> world apologizes for being so messy, changing and unstable :-) .

It's reasonably straightforward to change the contents of a static
file on a web server, no?

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Monday, 7 August 2006 13:03:34 UTC