RE: Non-Text Literals

>>Don't inline the photo as a literal.  Give the photograph a URL and
>>associate it with you:
>
>That's not a solution to the problem. I want to hand someone something
>self-contained, I don't necessarily have a useful place on the web to put
>things, nor may the reader have internet access at the point at which
>they wish to examine my document.

Your problem sounds very similar to what I've been facing. I want a bundle
of associated resources, and I'm now looking at storing these together so
relative references can be made. Relative URIs are just a little too hacky
for my liking, and so I've been looking at using xlink:href/xml:base where
the base URI is that of the RDF document. I think this is reasonable on a
semantic level, and it should be easy enough in practice to read the
"images/pic.jpg" using the local filesystem tree when offline rather than
the 'true' http version. I don't know whether it'll be necessary yet, but
I'm looking at adding a bit more information about the resource using the
methods of RDDL.

One possibility for physical bundling would be to use 'rdfz', and zip all
the files together. I *think* this would be possible & legal using existing
formats/protocols, and should be straightforward to hack in practice.

>Of course this may be exceeding the expectations for RDF...

Perhaps a bit sticky, but I think that RDF has to be able to do this sort of
thing (and do it well) - after all, an offline URI identified resource is
still a valid resource to be described, like that bloke over there.
Personally I would avoid inlining the data into a literal, though on
practical (/aesthetic!) grounds - I can't see a problem in principle.

Cheers,
Danny.

Received on Sunday, 1 September 2002 05:49:26 UTC