Re: A Dirk and Ndia story about RDF and URIs and HTTPrange14

I think it really leads you down the wrong path to talk about first minting the URI and then putting something out  there that explains what you meant by it. I know thats what people WANT to think, but it leads you to imagine that a URI could have two senses, one the "natural", undocumented sense, and another the sense which appears when you put up the description (and disappears when the server goes down for the last time).

You can avoid this fallacy merely by being more careful about the order. Your dbpedia server arranges its state so that subsequent later requests for a URI will (DNS and Apache willing) result in some results. But the URI choice is constrained almost completely by the server configuration, DNS, available protocols, etc.

You can change the case of the host, add or omit the port, perhaps hex encode some characters or even do Unicode normalization and get the same behavior.

If you are depending on the web behavior to establish meaning, then all of those spellings should mean the same thing.

If you are not, if the web behavior of the URI is just advisory and you could use http://example.com and HTTP://eXAMplE.com:80<http://eXAMplE.com:80>/ to meam different things, then why bother setting up a server at all?

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-----Original message-----
From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>
To: "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>
Sent: Mon, Apr 2, 2012 16:00:02 GMT+00:00
Subject: Re: A Dirk and Ndia story about RDF and URIs and HTTPrange14

On 4/2/12 9:06 AM, Larry Masinter wrote:
> I said
>> There are no "owners" of URIs here.
>> There is no process of "mint" here.
>> There is no notion of "resource" and "representation" here.
>> There's no need to talk about two resources being the "same", or using "different" URIs for the "same" resource.
>> There's no separation of "information resource" vs. "general resource".
> ... to which I got some use cases where these terms, processes, distinctions might make sense.
>
> But by "here" I meant "in my story ".  I am not denying there are circumstances where you would naturally like to use that terminology,  but rather that there are enough use cases where the those terms and distinctions do not make sense, and it isn't necessary to reference those concepts.
>
> So spare me the use cases where you think "mint" makes sense, where you can argue that there is someone who really does seem to "own" a URI, where there is a clear distinction between "resource" and "representation", etc.
>
> Larry
>
>
>
When publishing Linked Data via a Linked Data oriented server.

DBpedia is a live example. The server is *minting* URIs to serve a very
specific purpose :-)

--

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen
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OpenLink Software
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