- From: Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com>
- Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2003 08:56:38 -0700
- To: Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>
- Cc: "ext Hammond, Tony (ELSLON)" <T.Hammond@elsevier.com>, www-rdf-interest@w3.org, uri@w3.org
Patrick Stickler wrote: > But when all one has is a single URI, how do you find out *where* > authoritative descriptive metadata resides, if that URI is not > meaningful to HTTP? That's the problem. If all you have is > uri:foo:blargh how do you know where to go for information about > the thing denoted by that URI, and how do you know that the information > you find is authoritative? And even if you manage to work out a > solution, will that solution scale globally? Fine---there needs to be a standard solution for finding out "where authoritative descriptive metadata resides." We can all agree that this is a problem. So? "Everything HTTP" is one answer that has the side-effect of confusing the resource with its metadata. There are surely thousands of other answers. Here are a few off the top of my head. (I'm not proposing them---I'm just pointing out that there are thousands of other answers that don't have the same semantic deficiencies.) 1. The uri+meta: scheme, e.g. uri+meta:person:poets:shakespeare?meta=http://shakespeare.org/bard.rdf . (This would best be done with a URI comparison algorithm that ignored the ?meta part.) 2. The rdf:baseMetadataURI attribute, e.g. rdf:baseMetadataURI="http://example.org/metadata/lookup?" 3. The new protocal that replaces HTTP (yes, there will be one, just as sure as there will be a syntax that replaces XML) might reserve an entire branch of its URI tree for just this problem, e.g. ytp://metadata/lookup?person:poets:shakespeare . Maybe YTP will have its own system of DNS-like tables that route requests to this tree to a metadata page on the server of the owner of the object. 4. Heck, maybe the W3C or some other standard body could even do the same thing with HTTP, reserving a branch and saying that, "If you see an identifier in a specific scheme, use http://metadata.net/... to get its metadata." Oh, wait, the DOI/handle.net people are already doing that. If we use HTTP for everything, what happens when HTTP is replaced by the next protocol? The likely answer would be, "well, we'll just map all those HTTP requests to the new YTP URI tree in some standard way." Good answer---but why can't we do the same thing now with other URI schemes that doesn't pretend to indicate a retrieval method, be it info: or whatever? Garret
Received on Thursday, 2 October 2003 11:56:56 UTC