Re: naive question: why prefer absolute URIs to # URIs for linked data?

Sorry, reference one was intended to be to the definition of IR in WebArch 
[1]. The quote I refer to is:

"By design a URI identifies one resource. We do not limit the scope of what 
might be a resource. The term "resource" is used in a general sense for 
whatever might be identified by a URI. It is conventional on the hypertext 
Web to describe Web pages, images, product catalogs, etc. as “resources”. 
The distinguishing characteristic of these resources is that all of their 
essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message. We identify this 
set as “information resources.”

This document is an example of an information resource. It consists of 
words and punctuation symbols and graphics and other artifacts that can be 
encoded, with varying degrees of fidelity, into a sequence of bits. There 
is nothing about the essential information content of this document that 
cannot in principle be transfered in a message. In the case of this 
document, the message payload is the representation of this document."

Yes, this definition is troublingly vague around the edges and in some of 
its terminology, but the example in the 2nd paragraph makes pretty clear 
what's mostly intended. There is no reference here to any particular 
retrieval protocol being provided; the example rests on the fact that the 
words, punctuation symbols, etc. that form the document can be encoded into 
bits and transmitted in a message, should you wish to do so. Same as with 
the text of the Declaration of Independence. We compare that with a URI 
that identifies something more tangible, like my pet dog, which can't 
meaningfully be "encoded into a sequence of bits".

Noah

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-benefits

On 10/21/2011 10:50 AM, Noah Mendelsohn wrote:
>
>
> On 10/21/2011 8:28 AM, Nathan wrote:
>> The only potential clarity I have on the issue, and why I've clipped above,
>> is that I feel the /only/ property that distinguishes an "IR" from anything
>> else in the universe, is that it has a [transfer/transport]-protocol as a
>> property of it.
>
> Really? Let's imagine something that's pretty clearly a document, e.g. the
> text of the US Declaration of Independence. Let's say someone, for whatever
> good or bad reason, decides to mint a URN to identify it. I would claim:
>
> * It's clearly within the scope of what was intended by an IR. I was
> careful to say that the resource in question is the text of the
> declaration, that text can easily be conveyed in a message using an
> encoding like ASCII, unicode, etc.
>
> * There is not necessarily a transfer/transport protocol associated with
> it, and if there were, the choice of protocol(s) might evolve over decades
> or centuries.
>
> The distinguishing characteristic of an IR is that it is ammenable to
> (having it's "essence" [1]) conveyed in a message. It is not required that
> the means of doing so are spelled out in advance, stable over time, or in
> fact ever realized in practice. The declaration is an IR, IMO, whether or
> not we choose to deploy it using HTTP at a given time. And...because it is
> an IR, status code 200 is appropriate should we at any point wish to use HTTP.
>
> I think the distinction is important.
>
> Noah

Received on Friday, 21 October 2011 14:59:34 UTC