Subgroup to handle semantics of HTTP etc?

At the Cambridge Semantic Web Gathering a few days ago I was was  
chatting with Jonathan Rees and Alan Ruttenberg  from Science commons  
about basically web architecture from the semantic web point of view.  
Alan felt an urgent need for much more concrete basis for this than  
he could get by trying to red the current AWWW with semantic web- 
colored glasses.   He, as , would really like to have an ontology for  
the things the AWWW document talks about, and a formal definition of  
the semantics of things like HTTP fetches, hash, etc.

At the same time, Anne van Kesteren  has been suggesting that the  
HTTP spec doesn't have a very clear semantics.   He asks, for  
example, what happens if a server sends two different content-type  
headers, for example?  There are no HTTP validators, ad the  
significance of it is not obvious.  This problem could also be helped  
partially by some semantics  expressed more explicitly.

Two question Alan asked recently (on the list and offline) were

- "How can one ever show that a web site is behaving contrary to the  
web architecture?"  and

-  "How do i know what triples an RDF system is able to draw from an  
HTTP interaction?"

Both god questions.
The answer to the first question could be to draw all the triples  
from the HTTP transactions and the documents published, and then  
check for OWL inconsistencies.  Which begs the second question.

This is relevant to the Tabulator project, as Tabulator does this,  
and uses the conclusions from HTTP transactions to (for example)  
select user interface operations to offer the user, and to generate  
warning messages about inappropriate behavior.

We wondered whether it would be  good idea to put together some kind  
of a task force under the TAG  to propose set of these axioms and an  
ontology.

Tim

PS:

Received on Monday, 15 October 2007 20:07:51 UTC