RE: Semantic web - a fractal ongoing struggle toward greater consistency.

 

 -----Original Message----- 
 From: ext Sherman Monroe [mailto:shermanmonroe@yahoo.com] 
 Sent: Mon 2003-08-04 13:42 
 To: Tim Berners-Lee; pat hayes 
 Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org 
 Subject: Re: Semantic web - a fractal ongoing struggle toward greater consistency.
 
 The question is, what use is there in using the http protocol (or even the "http://" prefix) in the semantic space? 
 

Quite simply, an existing, proven, globally deployed infrastructure. 


  
 I'm for creating a new protocol explicitly for the semantic space. 
  

So am I, insofar as capturing SW server behavior, though not an entirely new protocol.
 
C.f. http://sw.nokia.com/URIQA.html for extensions to HTTP to do this.

  
 When I look into a source file, I would like to know that a URI beginning with "http://" references a web doc, and one beginning with "rdfp://" (or something) references a URI in the semantic space.
  

But there's no need for such a syntactic distinction. We can use an http: URI to denote a resource, any kind of resource, and then use GET to obtain a representation of that resource (if any) or MGET to obtain a description of that resource (if any), etc.
 
The intersection of the Web and the Semantic Web is the shared set of URIs denoting the resources for which there are both representations and descriptions.
 
Patrick

Received on Monday, 4 August 2003 09:27:08 UTC