RE: What if an URI also is a URL

... and they say this mailing list has been "replaced" (which sounds
like dead) ;-) ...

Thank you for joining, James, I'm well aware that this is not exactly a
new topic. Hope it doesn't bore people to death right now.

Am Montag, den 27.08.2007, 17:17 -0400 schrieb Lynn, James (HP
Software):
> When we speak of a URI refering to something, we must consider in what context we are speaking. 
> In the HTTP context, i.e. what does a server return, it refers to a context.
> In the RDF context, i.e. what is the meaning of the URI in an RDF statement, a URI is a string of characters which uniquely identifies some "thing", some concept, such as a person, a book, the color "green", or in some cases a website or resource on the web. 

For me this means: A URI is like a word in a language we hardly
understand. The word has no definition as such - if you don't know what
it means, you have to look it up in a dictionary. 

We can look up http URIs to see what they refer to. If they return a
200/OK and a PDF (.HTML, .GIF, .OGG), then that's what the URI "means".
These are the easy words in this language.

The fun begins when the URI doesn't resolve to anything, returns a 303
or is a hash-URI that returns a RDF/XML-document. Then we can assume the
URI is not about a document but about something else - something that we
might learn more about by reading associated RDF-files.

Thats how I try to think of it; it makes things relatively unambiguous,
though sometimes more complicated (see my initial examples), but its
obvious that quite a lot of people who author RDF out there have quite a
lot of different approaches. Mixing those seems to be a challenge...

Regards,
Oskar

Received on Monday, 27 August 2007 22:31:16 UTC