RE: HTTP Methods

It seems that you're missing the key point of why MIME types
and conneg do not work in this case.

You can have a resource which has, as its primary representation,
an RDF/XML instance, yet that RDF/XML instance is not, nor does
it, or should/can it contain a description of the resource itself.

How do you request a description about an RDF/XML instance
if you cannot make clear to the server that you are asking for a
description, and not simply an RDF/XML encoded representation?

You can't.

The RDF/XML representation of an RDF schema or OWL ontology
is not the same thing as a description of that RDF schema or OWL
ontology, even if the description can be considered a kind of
representation.

Conneg is great. And there is alot of functionality that can be 
triggered by MIME types. But the distinction between a description
and some other kind of representation is not a matter of encoding.
It is a fundamental semantic distinction -- and one, by the way, that
is reflected in the architecture of most content management solutions.

Cheers,

Patrick


-----Original Message-----
From:	www-tag-request@w3.org on behalf of ext Jon Hanna
Sent:	Wed 2004-02-25 17:21
To:	Stickler Patrick (Nokia-TP-MSW/Tampere)
Cc:	Danny Ayers; Joe Gregorio; www-tag@w3.org
Subject:	Re: HTTP Methods



Quoting Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>:

> 
> 
> On Feb 25, 2004, at 16:48, ext Jon Hanna wrote:
> 
> >
> > Quoting Patrick Stickler <patrick.stickler@nokia.com>:
> >
> >> What if the resource denoted by the URI has an RDF/XML representation
> >> yet you don't want the representation of the resource, you want its
> >> description.
> >
> > Could you elaborate on the difference between "description" and
> > "representation"?
> >
> 
> C.f. http://sw.nokia.com/uriqa/URIQA.html

D'oh. I had that page open in another window at the time and everything.

"Concise bounded descriptions of resources can be considered to be a form of
representation"
And I consider them as such.

"however they are a highly specialized form"
'Specialised' is relative.

"and not the most usual or obvious form in a web primarily intended for human
consumption"
Human consumption is a factor of rendering, not of data (reading raw HTML sucks
too).

Well, at least I remember why I wasn't convinced by MGET when it was first
mentioned on rdf-ig; I'm not convinced of descriptions as fundamentally
different to representations. I also think that "concise bounded resource
descriptions" are the minimum of any generally useful RDF representation, and
as such a GET for application/rdf+xml (or any RDF serialisation) should return
such a description (or as much of one as there is available information to
return), optionally with additional data (which granted could make for an
efficiency issue, indeed a heavy efficiency issue, since there would be unused
triples transmitted).

A triple that would belong in a "concise bounded resource description" that
wouldn't belong in a general application/rdf+xml representation would be a good
counter-argument ("good" in that it would make me personally more convinced),
otherwise it is relatively easy to produce the former from the latter (a lot of
unneeded triples, maybe the lot, could be discarded by a stream-based reader
quite efficiently).

I think I'm happier to discard triples than to use a new method.

-- 
Jon Hanna
<http://www.hackcraft.net/>
"…it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for
equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people." - jargon.txt

Received on Wednesday, 25 February 2004 22:25:01 UTC