Re: Why are RDF, RDFS & OWL not returning human-friendly versions?

On 03/31, Richard Light wrote:
> 
> I was bitten by this issue when testing content negotiation outcomes. The
> issue is that your browser is not an innocent bystander in this HTTP
> transaction: it will have provided a requested set of response formats (and
> not just 'text/html') which will have an impact on what is returned. And
> different browsers have different default settings (which you as their user
> can alter).

Indeed, I remember one well known web browser that for a time prioritised
'image/*' over 'text/html' -- yes, it preferred pictures of web pages to web
pages.

However in this instance, there is no HTML page about the RDFS vocabulary that
is returned upon explicitly setting the accept header:

    $ curl -HAccept:text/html https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
    <html><head>
    <title>406 Not Acceptable</title>
    </head><body>
    <h1>Not Acceptable</h1>
    <p>An appropriate representation of the requested resource /1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns could not be found on this server.</p>
    Available variants:
    <ul>
    <li><a href="22-rdf-syntax-ns.ttl">22-rdf-syntax-ns.ttl</a> , type text/turtle, charset utf-8</li>
    <li><a href="22-rdf-syntax-ns.rdf">22-rdf-syntax-ns.rdf</a> , type application/rdf+xml</li>
    </ul>
    </body></html>

(If your mail-reader ignores the text/plain content type on this message, and
tries nevertheless to interpret it as HTML, the above may get mangled, but it's
a 406 Not Acceptable response that gives links to the Turtle and RDF/XML
representations).

Additionally, if Turtle is to be returned, it would probably be a good idea to
have a link to the RDF concepts document directly in the "me, I'm an ontology"
stanza:

    <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> a owl:Ontology ;
      dc:title "The RDF Concepts Vocabulary (RDF)" ;
      dc:description "This is the RDF Schema for the RDF vocabulary terms in the RDF Namespace, defined in RDF 1.1 Concepts." .

There is such a link in the definitions of some of the individual terms to the
relevant section.

Best wishes,

-- 
William Waites | wwaites@inf.ed.ac.uk
Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Received on Sunday, 31 March 2019 11:19:45 UTC