RE: Uniform access to descriptions

> From: Mikael Nilsson [mailto:mikael@nilsson.name]
>
> fre 2008-03-21 klockan 14:15 +0000 skrev Booth, David (HP Software -
> Boston):
> > The wiki page at
> > http://esw.w3.org/topic/FindingResourceDescriptions
> > omits two obvious potential solutions:
> >
> > 1. Hand out the URI of the metadata (which should *include*
> > a link to
> > the data) instead of handing out the URI of the data directly.  It
> > seems silly to add a new header to the HTTP protocol just
> > because data
> > publishers can't remember to hand out the metadata URI.
> >
> > 2. Bundle the data with the metadata, as previously described here:
> > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2008Feb/0039.html
> >
> > Perhaps these solutions wouldn't be good enough for the use
> > cases you
> > wish to address, but what exactly *are* the use cases?  The
> > wiki page has only a placeholder for them.
>
> Here's a simple one that covers the above cases.
>
> Alice browse the web and finds a link to
> http://example.org/writings/essay.txt
>
> It's a text/plain document, and her SW-enabled browser cannot show her
> any metadata about the document.
>
> 1. Surely you can't expect hyperlink to lead to the metadata? The WWW
> (socument web) relies on content-to-content links, and we
> need to build on that.

Of course there should be a URI for the metadata!  Why wouldn't there be?

You seem to me making some kind of major underlying assumptions here that I don't know about.  If  the use case could be more completely spelled out, that might bring it to light.

>
> 2. There is no definition in the text/plain MIME type
> registration about
> how to  include machine-parsable metadata. Other conventions, such as
> using http://example.org/writings/essay#it etc, falls on the
> assumption that we want to build on top of the existing WWW.

Right, but if you want to serve machine-processable metadata that describes a chunk of text, why not just serve RDF for the metadata and either include the chunk of text in an RDF assertion or include a pointer to it?   You can certainly point to existing content that way.



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 Monday, 24 March 2008 12:12:08 UTC