RE: URI etymology

> This is all fundamental thinking behind the essence of what URIs are:
> they're just strings with the simple rule that they're unique. Apart
> from that, you can't really say anything - URI strings are opaque, and
> totally defined by the context of their uses. The "resource" that they
> identify is a conceptual mapping between the URI and the entity, so
> it's not something that is written in stone somewhere.
>
> --
> Kindest Regards,
> Sean B. Palmer
> @prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
> :Sean :hasHomepage <http://purl.org/net/sbp/> .

I completely agree.  In fact RDF is about providing meta-data for things
like URIs.  Wanting URIs to encode meta-data within themselves for use by
RDF is circular.

If you want meta-data about a URI tie it to an RDF structure.  That is what
RDF is for.

URI: a pointer.
RDF: meta-data.

This seems very obvious to me.  The meta-data used by an RDF application
about a resource is associated with the resource (on the server side) and
**encoded in RDF**.

This is very much in the spirit of XML and the W3C tradition where things
like XSLT are written in XML.

What this thread is driving at is a natural application of RDF.  Indeed, the
RDF documentation indicates that this need is the primary reason the RDF
project was started.

--------------------------


Now for some practicalities:

How do I automatically pass RDF data *before* an attempt to retrieve the
proper data of a locator (including a URI)?

Can I pass that data from an RDF in an HTTP message header?

If I have to pass data from the RDF URI meta-data and meta-meta-data
[d(meta-data)/dx] in an HTTP body, can I add a code to the header or the
first line of the RDF text that will let a browser effectively pre-process
the RDF data on the underlying resource as a before event?  [This seems
eminently doable.]

On the server side how do I know whether I am getting a HTTP request for the
resource meta-data or for the resource itself?

Received on Friday, 15 June 2001 12:39:04 UTC