Re: Terminology Question concerning Web Architecture and Linked Data

Mark Baker wrote:
> 
> Sorry for the late response.  The cross-posting messed up my mail filters.
> 
> On 7/7/07, Chris Bizer <chris@bizer.de> wrote:
>> 1. DBpedia: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tim_Berners-Lee
>> 2. Hannover DBLP Server:
>> http://dblp.l3s.de/d2r/resource/authors/Tim_Berners-Lee
>> 3. Berlin DBLP Server:
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007
>> 4. RDF Book Mashup:
>> http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/Tim+Berners-Lee
> 
> [...]
> 
>> Question 1: According to the terminology of the Architecture of the WWW
>> document [4] are all these URIs aliases for the same non-information
>> resource (our current view) or are they referring to different resources?
>> Does the TAG finding "On Linking Alternative Representations To Enable
>> Discovery And Publishing " [5] about generic and specific resources apply
>> here, meaning that the URIs 1,2,3,5 refer to different specific
>> non-information resources that are related to one generic non-information
>> resource?

I'm neutral w.r.t. the answer here. It could be modelled either way, and 
the facts of the matter could go either way, given the nature of the 
current relevant specs.

> IMO, those URIs identify different resources.  I say this because they
> all return different representations when I dereference them.  If they
> identified the same resource then their representations would be
> identical (see Roy's definition of resource in his REST dissertation).

I am suprised to hear you say that. The Web allows that you might 
receive different resource representations, or indeed nothing, on each 
dereference. For example - a weather site, or a fortunate cookie site. 
TimBL is not the weather, nor is he a fortune cookie, admittedly. But it 
doesn't follow from the fact that you've received different 
representations in different HTTP conversations, that those 
conversations were about distinct things. Even if you hold language 
negotiation, content negotiation, user agent etc constant, even if you 
hold time constant, incoming packet size, HTTP referer ... you've no 
right to assume you'll always get "the" representation.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Sunday, 22 July 2007 13:27:10 UTC