Re: Making MGET more GET-friendly?

On Mar 12, 2004, at 13:02, ext Sandro Hawke wrote:

>>>
>>> What would the standard say?   I have a URI, and I want to know more.
>>> Should I do an MGET or a GET?
>>
>> That depends on who is doing the asking and what the needs are.
>>
>> If it is a human, then probably a GET would be most useful, since
>> (a) humans tend not to care about the specifics of URI denotation
>> and semantics and are able to guess about alot of stuff and (b) most
>> humans wouldn't grok RDF/XML anyway.
>
> So if a human gives a browser the URI of an RDF Property, they
> get... what?  ... some documentation?

If you mean, what can they GET via that URI, then that is
entirely up to the owner of that URI.

URIQA says absolutely *nothing* about GET.

If the human has some way to tell the browser to execute
an MGET, then they will (presumably) be shown some RDF/XML,
though a more capable implementation of URIQA may, via
conneg and the like, return an HTML representation of
the concise bounded description which may be more useful
for presentation in a browser.

>
>> If it is a sw agent, then probably an MGET would be most useful,
>> since (a) sw agents tend to have a hard time understanding
>> arbitrary web content and (b) most sw agents will probably
>> grok and benefit far more from the RDF/XML anyway.
>
> So in general, if you're like a web browser or a search engine, or
> some other thing that wants to know a lot, you do both.
>
> I guess that makes sense.

In fact, our metadata-driven faceted search solution does both. When
generating the search/navigation indices, it executes an MGET to
fetch the metadata description (some of which is treated as indexable
content, and some of which is used as facets) and also executes a GET
to fetch the indexable content (for those media types it can deal with).

In both requests, the semantics are clear and the server behavior
consistent -- as to whether the agent is asking for and getting
a formal description of the resource versus some (possibly unusable)
representation of the resource.

And even in cases where the agent cannot deal with a particular media
type of a representation, the metadata still gets indexed in a highly
useful manner.

Cheers,

Patrick


>
>      --sandro
>
>
>
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--

Patrick Stickler
Nokia, Finland
patrick.stickler@nokia.com

Received on Friday, 12 March 2004 08:20:49 UTC