Re: What if an URI also is a URL

On 14 Sep 2007, at 00:16, Reto Bachmann-Gmür wrote:
>> In the absence of such an explanation, an agent has little hope to
>> find out what he's looking at. He cannot use the URI to reliably  
>> refer
>> to anything, because he doesn't know what it will return tomorrow.
>> Bookmarking it, linking to it, or passing it on to someone else,
>> becomes a perilous affair. After all, I'd really like to know if I'm
>> looking at today's or yesterday's weather report. A weather report
>> that doesn't give me that information won't be popular.
> Certainly it would be nice to a have a technology that allows the  
> client
> to bookmark different "level of abstractions", e.g. having the browser
> ask you if would you like to bookmark "Today's weather in Bern",
> "Today's weather in Bern /English Version", "The weather in Bern on
> 2007-09-13" and so own.

Why, we have this technology. Give a distinct URI to each of these  
“levels of abstraction”, label each one clearly inside the associated  
representations, and provide links between them that allow a client  
to find the one he's interested in. This works for HTML as well as  
for RDF.

What else would we need?

>> A second, less helpful choice would be external information about the
>> resources. For example, there might be an RDF file or HTML file at
>> <http://Example.org/weather/> that tells us what all the individual
>> URIs refer to.
> And you may find two contradicting graphs on different locations  
> and the
> only thing you know is that at least one of them is wrong :-)

Happens to me all the time. Especially with weather reports ;-)

Richard



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> Reto Bachmann-Gmür
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Received on Friday, 14 September 2007 17:16:42 UTC