Re: caching HTTP 303 responses

On 07/12/07/07/07 11:59 +0100, Williams, Stuart (HP Labs, Bristol) wrote:
>So... does your agent already know the answer to a question that its
>about to ask?
>
>1) Do I need to ask this question or do I know enough about this thing
>already - chances are the answer is already squirrelled away in the
>agents knowledge base.
>
>2) Some answer tell you about more things than you asked about eg.
>Dublic Core - because a bunch of URIs for dc properties all redirect to
>the same description of all of them (modulo a spurious fragId last time
>I looked, that gets stripped anyway - and for which there is no referent
>in the resulting description). So you may already be informed about
>things that you haven't asked about.
>
>The imperative for the agent to ask a question seems to be lack of
>knowledge of the answer. If it already has the answer... you can avoid
>asking the question.
Good explanation. Your story surely holds in the abstract and indeed makes 
sense if we think about 'agents'. But if you think concretely about the 
existing Web infrastructure, the agent doesn't need to do this reasoning, 
because the cache will do it for him. So instead of putting your decision 
rules in each and every Semantic Web agent and bypassing all existing 
caches out there in the Web, the client shouldn't worry about this at all 
and let the cache handle it. But Web caching isn't very useful with 303's.

 -eyal

Received on Thursday, 12 July 2007 11:36:15 UTC