Re: Resource-Type Revisited (httpRange-14)

Sean,

Interesting scenario and interesting proposal. Indeed: When linking to  
a thing, one may want to provide metadata about the document  
describing the thing, and the 303 style makes this hard. This is a  
very good point, and one that has not occurred to me before.

I don't really have an opinion yet about your proposed solution. I  
just notice one interesting thing: All of this is a non-issue when  
hash URIs are used. You get the ability to describe the linked  
document for free, without any need for :from or new headers or  
additional round-trips:

<#me>
     foaf:knows <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i> .

<http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i>
     a foaf:Person;
     foaf:name "Tim Berners-Lee" .

<http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card>
     rdfs:label "Personal FOAF profile of Tim Berners-Lee" .

This raises the question: Why pile hack upon hack to make slash URIs  
work as semwebby identifiers? Don't we have a perfectly adequate  
solution in the form of hash URIs? I'm not sure about the answer, just  
thinking.

All the best,
Richard


On 4 Jan 2008, at 15:30, Sean B. Palmer wrote:

> The Resource-Type header has been proposed before, but today I
> realised why it and its brethren are really useful. Let me walk you
> through a scenario.
>
> So here's the URI of TimBL's FOAF file:
>
> http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card
>
> When I put that in my Semantic Web Browser (I'm using Arcs, but
> Tabulator and others do similar things), it lets me view a bunch of
> information about TimBL. It finds by smushing that the following URIs
> all identify TimBL:
>
> * http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i
> * http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/Tim+Berners-Lee
> * http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007
>
> Now, when I'm looking at facts about TimBL, it's not unreasonable that
> I should want to find out more information. Where should I look? Well,
> the first and most obvious place to look is at the URIs above. We
> already know that the first URI, without its fragment, is the URI of
> the FOAF file that I just loaded. What about the other two? What are
> they? What sort of information will they give me?
>
> As it happens, the second is Bookmashup data about TimBL (a human can
> tell from the URI but my browser can't), but I dunno what the third
> one is. After loading it I find that it gives me journal data.
>
> Wouldn't it be nifty if TimBL could, in his FOAF file, say things
> about those data sources? How would you imagine he'd do that? If you
> thought of the following, then you'd be *wrong*:
>
> <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/Tim+Berners-Lee>
>   dc:title "Bookmashup Data about TimBL" .
>
> <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007>
>   dc:title "Journals TimBL has Contributed To" .
>
> The problem, of course, is that these URIs identify TimBL the person,
> not documentation about TimBL. So when my SW browser smushes them, I
> get:
>
> <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i>
>   foaf:name "Tim Berners-Lee";
>   dc:title "Bookmashup Data about TimBL";
>   dc:title "Journals TimBL has Contributed To" .
>
> <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bookmashup/persons/Tim+Berners-Lee>
>   foaf:name "Tim Berners-Lee";
>   dc:title "Bookmashup Data about TimBL";
>   dc:title "Journals TimBL has Contributed To" .
>
> <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007>
>   foaf:name "Tim Berners-Lee";
>   dc:title "Bookmashup Data about TimBL";
>   dc:title "Journals TimBL has Contributed To" .
>
> Otherwise known as a bloomin' mess.
>
> The only way that we're able to have HTTP URIs denoting people at the
> moment is to have them 303, which is what the URIs above in fact do.
> For example:
>
> HEAD http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007
> ->
> HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
> Location: http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/page/person/100007
>
> So we *could* do this to give the information we want to give:
>
> <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/page/person/100007>
>   dc:title "Journals TimBL has Contributed To" .
>
> This is the URI that the URI denoting TimBL 303-see-others to.
>
> But it's impractical to do it this way for two reasons, one
> inconvenient for the producer and one inconvenient for the consumer:
>
> 1) If you want to make statements about the information resource that
> you eventually get, such as TimBL might want to do to give it a title
> in his FOAF file, then you have to do a HEAD on it to look it up.
> 2) Worst of all, this means that Semantic Web browsers have to do HEAD
> requests on things before they can tell what the titles are.
>
> That point 2) is especially, from my point of view, a disaster. It
> simply doesn't scale if you have hundreds of sources of data for
> something and you want the user to be able to browse through them by
> keyword, search their titles, and so on. You'd have to HEAD every
> single source! It ain't no good.
>
> So I figured that this would be okay:
>
> [ :from "http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007";
>  dc:title "Journals TimBL has Contributed To" ] .
>
> And indeed it is, as long as you make sure to use a *literal* for the
> URI. If you used an RDF URI Reference like this:
>
> [ :from <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/100007>;
>  dc:title "Journals TimBL has Contributed To" ] .
>
> It could be smushed to, for example:
>
> [ :form <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/card#i>;
>   foaf:name "Tim Berners-Lee";
>   dc:title "Bookmashup Data about TimBL";
>   dc:title "Journals TimBL has Contributed To" ] .
>
> Which is our bloomin' mess all over again. So it has to be a literal.
>
> This got me thinking about TimBL's Description-Id proposal:
>
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2007Dec/0024
> Alternative to 303 response: Description-ID: header
> Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2007 19:53:55 -0500
>
> I said I'd come back to it when I understood the implications more
> fully, and so I'm coming back to it now. It's actually fine as a
> proposal because it's not much different from our current 303
> technique. But that's also the downside: it's not much different from
> our current 303 technique! In other words, you still have to maintain
> two URIs: in the TimBL/Journal-info case that's one for the person,
> and one for the journal information about the person.
>
> But thanks to the :from property, we no longer really need a URI for
> the information resource. So we can revive Sandro Hawke's old
> suggestion from 2003...
>
> [[[
> So one might call the HTTP header "Resource-Type", in nice
> parallel to "Content-Type".
> ]]] - http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Feb/0299
>
> Which Jonathan Borden explained rather clearly here:
>
> [[[
> I generally agree. "Site" is one type of resource, perhaps its special
> enough to get its own HTTP header (?) but why not just (example HTTP
> response headers):
>
> Resource-Type: http://example.org/siteOntology#Site
> Resource-Description: http://example.org/site.rdf
>
> would solve this problem, as well as [httpRange-14] in a general  
> fashion.
> ]]] - http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Mar/0006
>
> In fact, as you can hopefully see, Resource-Description is the same as
> TimBL's Description-Id suggestion. All of this is quite obvious stuff.
>
> So with all these bits and pieces—the :from property, Resource-Type,
> and Resource-Description/Description-Id—that'd give us some fairly
> nice tools for making the Web a bit more Semantic Web friendly.
>
> TimBL asked me a question about Resource-Type:
>
> <timbl> sbp, though, if you are sending the description in the body,
> why do you need the type in the header?
>
> Of course we *could* do something like this:
>
> InformationResource: no
>
> That'd be the simplest thing to do. But I think that it's nice to have
> a minimal amount of documentation, and if we're saying that this
> strange thing in HTTP space isn't an information resource, we might as
> well at the very least tell people what it is. Yeah it's a bit
> redundant, but I think it's really handy as a header: HEAD is the way
> to do queries to find the *essential* properties of something, and
> type seems to be a rather essential property.
>
> I'd be happy with "InformationResource: no", too, having said that.
> Anything that lets me use a *single* 200 to give information about
> people and the moon and whatever is fine by me. As long as we have the
> :from property too, that's all we need to say stuff about the
> information resource.
>
> -- 
> Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Friday, 4 January 2008 17:40:43 UTC