- From: Oskar Welzl <lists@welzl.info>
- Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:47:34 +0200
- To: Reto Bachmann-Gmür <rbg@talis.com>
- Cc: wangxiao@musc.edu, semantic-web@w3.org
Am Donnerstag, den 30.08.2007, 22:28 +0200 schrieb Reto Bachmann-Gmür: > But talking about standards, why is this discussion on a list which has > been replaced by semantic-web@w3.org? dumb boy hit [reply] again; changed it now. Maybe we'll have to change to topic, too, soon: This is going to be somewhat like "What's the content of an information resource"? Am Donnerstag, den 30.08.2007, 22:30 +0200 schrieb Reto Bachmann-Gmür: > Oskar Welzl wrote: > > Pity, though, that there hardly seems to be an agreement on how to > > handle this issue, so simply by choosing the above URI myself I will not > > prevent *others* making statements like > > <#thismail> mail:sender <http://oskar.twoday.net> > > when they refer to an update-notification they received from the weblog. > > > Reading this I think I misunderstood what you mean with "blog" I was > referring to a blog as a changing collection of articles not as > something that sends email. If we agree that an information resource > can't be the mail:sender of a mail then the statement > > <#thismail> mail:sender <http://oskar.twoday.net> > > is necessarily wrong, as a GET request to http://oskar.twoday.net is > responded with a 2XX response and with this response the resource in > unambiguously an information[1]. resource. Well, the "sending mail"-example was certainly the outer limit of nonsense I could possibly construct to get the message through, but I meanwhile think my confusion has a different cause (and it was you who pointed me to it): Lets forget for a minute that a blog is more than just a collection of posts and usually has properties like "allowsCommentsFrom", "offersFeedType", "Blogroll" etc. Assume that it *is* a mere collection of posts, sorted by date, latest first, 10 per page. Period. You type http://my.blog.tld in your browser to go there, subsequent pages can be reached with http://my.blog.tld/?start=11 etc. In one of your previous posts you wrote: "A Blog is an Information Resource which could be described as an ordered collection of posts, the HTML returned by the webserver is (or should be) a suitable representation of that thing." I didn't like this idea first (and said so, IIRC ;) ...), but it seems logical to me now. *If* we think of a collection of posts and nothing else, it would probably fit the concept of an "Information resource". And what URI other than http://my.blog.tld would we have to name it? On the other hand, the very content of the 10-posts-list returned by the server (as what could be seen as the HTML-representation of the information resource "blog") is an information resource in its own right. Its "The 10 latest posts from my blog". No other way to refer to it than via http://my.blog.tld again. Even in this simple construct, I can make statements about http://my.blog.tld in one RDF-document that contradict each other, like (in OTN, oskars triple notation): http://my.blog.tld dc:coverage a period from 2003-2007 (this was about the blog) http://my.blog.tld dc:coverage a period from Juli-August 2007 (this is about the 1st page of the blog) Same for statements about who commented there etc. - many can be true for only one of the two information resources that are addressed by http://my.blog.tld To get around this, my original assumption was that before using a URI to name something, I should check if its suitable by narrowing the "information resource" as much as possible: take the representation you get, take all possible interpretations of what it represents (a blog, the first 10 postings, the author himself) and always take the narrowest. What you end up with is, almost always, only a little more than "the document". I like this approach for its simplicity, but it breaks a lot. Take SIOC as an example. sioc:forum/sioc:site is exactly what we're talking about here; they always refer to it via a URI that is, in fact, "the first page of the collection". This is not wrong as such, it just creates ambiguity, which UIRs should not have. (In fact it was my current work on a SIOC-export that confronted my with this boring question again after so many years.) Now I go the steep way and say that http://my.blog.tld, the blog, should not be confused with http://my.blog.tld, the most recent posts. The blog should have its own URI, as "10 most recent posts" is the narrower construct. Next question: I plan to use http://my.blog.tld/ID/names#thisblog as sioc:site and have an RDF/XML-document at ../ID/names to further define #thisblog. Now how do I point to the preferred link/bookmark/"entry point" (which is, of course, http://my.blog.tld/) with a well-known vocabulary? I was tempted to use rss:link, but am very unsure about it... (Not finding a usable hint on Google made me even more uneasy with the whole topic, as this suggests nobody on this planet ever thought of *not* using the URI of the main page as the URI for the whole site.) So you see, even though there might have been a misunderstanding about the concept of a "blog", this wasn't the cause of my problems. Even when following your 'collection of posts'='information resource' definition, I get deeper and deeper into trouble. You already got me on a better track once by pointing out the somewhat vague definition of information resource - maybe you got some new input for me to chew on ;) Thanks, Oskar
Received on Thursday, 30 August 2007 22:47:54 UTC