working around the identity crisis

Sorry, reposting this with a more sensible title - a discussion about
working around the 'identity crisis' for http uris:

http://esw.w3.org/topic/SkosDev/IdentityCrisis

Would very much like to know what folks think of this.  Have I just managed
to redescribe some emerging consensus, have I misunderstood anything, should
I go away and read more?

I wanted to say also that I am acutely aware that alot of people have spent
a lot more time thinking and writing about this than I have.  I'm really
just trying to understand this problem space, and get to a place were I can
effectively explain the issue (and the options) to other people.

Responding to Patrick:
'If you have a URI that identifies a concept, and dereferencing that URI in
a browser results in some web page displayed in that browser, that does not
mean that the URI has been used to identify two things, the concept and
the web page (document).'

I think that puts very concisely the fundamental point I was trying to make.
I probably didn't need to say any more than this.  

Responding to Daniel:
'A good solution, but I still prefer the notion of using XSLT to
transform the RDF/XML definition of a concept into a human friendly
HTML page about it.'

I agree that, as a matter of good practise, any alternate content-type
representations of the same concept need to be synchronised.  One way of
achieving this would be to use an RDF/XML description as the reference
point, and using XSLT to generate an HTML representation.   

Yours,

Alistair.

---
Alistair Miles
Research Associate
CCLRC - Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Building R1 Room 1.60
Fermi Avenue
Chilton
Didcot
Oxfordshire OX11 0QX
United Kingdom
Email:        a.j.miles@rl.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)1235 445440

Received on Sunday, 14 November 2004 17:20:51 UTC