RE: ISSUE-58: Scalability of URI Access to Resources

> From: Chimezie Ogbuji
> [ . . . ]
> 2. The dereference problem is scheme independent
> 
> The second part of this particular point assumes there will
> *inevitabely* be a need to dereference these (insert your
> favorite other scheme here) URIs.  This is not always true,
> especially when the URIs in question are RDF URIs.  RDF URIs
> and their use have a model-theoretic mechanism for making
> claims about the world.  In most cases, these claims (very
> mathematical in nature) are meant to be much more authoritative
> than what representation you might get from dereferencing
> the URIs themselves especially when the claims are subject to
> much more fine-grained constraints through the use of a formal
> (OWL) ontology.
> [ . . . ]

I think it is reasonable to assume that a URI consumer will inevitably
want to find out what resource that URI is intended to denote, i.e., to
obtain its URI declaration[1].  The URI declaration *is* the
authoritative information about what resource the URI denotes.  So it
sounds like you are describing a situation in which the representation
obtained via follow-your-nose[2] from the URI is *not* the
(authoritative) URI declaration, but the (authoritative) URI declaration
is provided in some other way.  If that is what you mean, then I do not
think that would be a good practice, because unless the representation
somehow explicitly indicates that it is *not* the (authoritative) URI
declaration, it is likely to mistaken for one.

I'm not sure this impacts the point you were trying to make regarding
Issue-58 though.  It sounds like you are saying that in some cases it is
more efficient to bundle together a number of URI declarations in a
single document, such that the client will not have to individually
dereference each URI to find its declaration.  I think that's quite a
reasonable desire.  At present, if HTTP URIs are used and
follow-your-nose[2] is assumed, we only have a way to do that with hash
URIs.  (URIs with the same racine[3] but different fragIDs all resolve
to the same document.)  It would be good to be able to do it with
303-URIs also, which is why in [1] I suggested that it would be helpful
to have a way to explicitly express URI declarations.  If a URI
declaration predicate like dbooth:declares were available, then when the
first URI of a related bunch is dereferenced to find its declaration,
the resulting document could declare all of the other URIs in that
bunch, and a client would then know that it did not need to dereference
each one to find its declaration.

References
1. URI declarations: http://dbooth.org/2007/uri-decl/
2. Follow-your-nose: http://esw.w3.org/topic/FollowYourNose
3. Racine: http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/Glossary


David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
+1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
http://www.hp.com/go/software

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not represent
the official views of HP unless explicitly stated otherwise.
 

Received on Saturday, 25 August 2007 04:41:03 UTC