Re: Semantic Web User Agent Conformance

Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> One of the biggest Semantic Web questions people are asking right now
> is: when a Semantic Web User Agent gets a document, how many normative
> ways of getting triples from it are there? Or, from the other
> direction: how many triples is the author asserting in some document?
> The answer is, generally, "how long is a piece of string?", but in
> fact there are lots of cases in which we need to construct more
> specific answers.
>
> I'm proposing some kind of work on conformance levels for Semantic Web
> User Agents, such that when someone says "how many triples are in
> $uri", we can answer confidently "a Class 2 Semantic Web User Agent
> will return 53 triples"; or perhaps not *that* abstract, but along
> those lines. It would be nice for example if we could specify things
> very granularly too, so a vocabulary for specifying user agent
> conformances on levels from the granular (single test cases) to the
> abstract ("I support RDF/XML") would also be good.
>
> The aim is for document producers to know how many UAs out there
> support the format that they're using, and to give some kind of
> regularity to what is currently a bundle of ad hoc solutions.
>   
I read a few times of your email and finally (I hope) start to know what 
your concern is.  Let me rephrase it with an example.

Say, an given URI  may return two variants - h and r, where 'h' is an 
html representation supporting both RDFa and GRDDL and 'r' is an RDF 
representation.  So, the resource 'x' may be represented by three set of 
RDF triples.
(a) straight from 'r'.
(b) from RDFa of 'h'
(c) GRDDLed from 'h'.

If there is any discrepancies among (a), (b) and (c), then there are two 
important architectural question.
(1) Should a, b and c express different kind of semantics?
(2) Which set of triples has precedence in the absence of any other 
knowledge? 

Is this what you are asking? If so, I do think it is a legitimate 
concern because it will help define the standard behavior of a user 
agents and also give URI owner a guideline on how to publish their data.

On a side note, I don't think the size of triples is an important factor 
but I am guessing you were simply using the number as a metaphor for 
precedence.

Xiaoshu

Received on Friday, 23 November 2007 00:54:08 UTC