Arch Doc: was Re: Are we elements or animals? (was: Use of fragment identifiers in XML)

> >I grab http://www.example.org/, it's an RDF document that says (in part):
> >
> ><rdf:Description rdf:about="#Dog">
> >   <dc:description>a dog, an animal with four legs</dc:description>
> ></rdf:Description>
> >
> >According to the URI spec (via the links I cited), the #Dog is an XML
element.

I find it helpful to think of it this way:

The snippet of XML (note quotes)
"<rdf:Description rdf:about="#Dog">
    <dc:description>a dog, an animal with four legs</dc:description>
</rdf:Description>"

is in some sense like the _representation_ of the resource identified by
http://www.example.org/#Dog

This representation is in RDF/XML, and is interpreted by an "RDF processor"
as describing the abstract resource "Dog".

I think of it that way because I find it a useful analogy between an URI
being dereferenced and returning a character based or binary
_representation_ of the RFC 2396 resource. A fragment identifier is used by
the client to find some fragment of this representation, and the process is
determined by the media type. Once the client has obtained the
representation fragment, this representation fragment can be thought of as a
representation of the RDF resource identified by the full URI reference.

If enough other people find this view useful, perhaps the arch doc could use
this as a way to tie together REST and URI references.

Jonathan

Received on Friday, 1 November 2002 07:20:36 UTC