Re: Information resources?

/ Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org> was heard to say:
|> Your system does not have to make those assertions and if I want to
|> make those assertions, I can make them in a different way.
|
| I'll think about it more, but it sounds like you're suggesting
| crippling my application.  It got lots of good data from its HTTP

I hope that "crippling" is an overstatement. :-)

| activities, which the user may want to know about, like when it
| fetched this representation and the Last-Modified date according to
| the server.  You're asking it not to store that data, I guess.

Well, or just accept that WebResources and Hoary Marmots are not
disjoint. And that the properties like "last modified" have a certain
amount of ambiguity associated with them.

Long ago, I tried to propose the compromise position that using a
magic hash was a good idea (a SHOULD) because it does avoid this sort
of problem.

But people are going to assign bare, naked http: URIs to physical
objects, dreams, and states of being. A robust system better be able
to deal.

| It could store it in RDF safely if it put the URI it used into a
| string literal.   That would probably work.   
|
|     http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is a species, a subclass
|       of Marmot, etc.
|
|     "http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot" is web address, which
|       we last dereferenced at time ____, and got a last-modify data
|       of ___, etc.
|
| Hrm.

Seems subtle. Maybe a blank node.

    http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot is a species, a subclass
      of Marmot, etc.

    ##blank is some metadata I got last time I did a GET on
    http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Hoary_Marmot. ##blank
    was last dereferenced at time ____, and had a last-modify date
    of ___, etc.

|> | Wordnet
|> | (as currently published at http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/) is one of
|> | the few vocabularies with this problem; I expect to motivate DanBri
|> | to fix it soon.=20=20
|> 
|> What fix do you propose? http://xmlns.com/wordnet/2.0#Hoary_Marmot is
|> just a complete non-starter given that the representation is on the
|> order of 14Mb.
|> 
|> I suppose http://xmlns.com/wordnet/2.0/Hoary_Marmot#entity is a
|> possibility, but it sure is ugly.
|
| I'm fond of SlashRedirection [1] for applications like this.  The
| current URLs work fine -- just issue a redirect (preferably 303 See
| Other, taking advantage of the actual if not necessarily intended
| meaning of its documentation).  Everything at purl.org has a redirect
| in there already, and it seems to work fine.

So http://xmlns.com/wordnet/2.0/Hoary_Marmot redirects to...what?

| (It's still not perfect -- Patrick will complain about the extra
| round-trip, and others about the challenges of setting up redirects,
| but it works.)

Nothing is perfect.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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