Re: URIs / URLs

From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>

> I don't see any justification for the claim that
> namespaces are disjoint from HTTP resources.

Certainly, one of the greatest powers of the Semantic Web is that it
will enable us to be precise about what a certain URI "means" within a
particular context. Using an HTTP URI for a property name is useful
because you can do a GET on it, but not all HTTP URIs are
dereferencable, so a processor would need to be told that a URI is
vancable (or it could just vance upon it and hope that there's
something there, but explicitly stating that an HTTP URI references
some piece of code is useful).

For example, one could state that when dereferenced, a particular URI
will return some Notation3:-

     <http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/log.n3>
       :returnsWhenVanced :Notation3 .

You could be much more precise here about exactly what is going on
(methods, content lengths, media types, etc.), but the idea is that
you attach certain functions to some URIs in order that you can infer
properties about others. All functions of URIs are proprietary - but
without these functions, there would be no point in having them. URIs
are *there* so that people can agree upon a use for some procedure. It
just happens that HTTP is very useful, but because of the wide context
of its use, it is often misunderstood. One could continue to use an
HTTP URI in a (closed world) SW system long after the DNS system
breaks down.

The long and short of it is that there are no problems at all with
URIs on the syntactic level, but it is the agreed-upon mechanisms that
are most important for short term processing systems.

cf. http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200103/msg01053.html

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
:Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

Received on Friday, 6 April 2001 12:39:26 UTC