Re: A proposal involving my original reason for commenting on httpRange-14

The web seems to have done a good job using "Pave the cow-paths" as a 
motto. Find what people are already doing and codify that.

It seems to me that what really happens on the web is:

People use web addresses (URLs) to let people get information over a 
global computer network.

A few people use unique strings (URIs) to identify things which they see 
a value in identifying.

Sometimes a URI is also a valid URL in which case
- Sometimes the stuff you get from resolving a URL describes the URI.
- Sometimes the stuff you get back is identified by the URI
- Most of the time nobody has explicitly thought about it and you should 
not make assumptions. You certainly shouldn't demand they change their 
site to solve a problem they don't care about.

The issue appears to be using a URL as the identifier for what you get 
back when you resolve the URL.

I really like the idea of using HTTP headers to allow you to say 
explicitly;
- what the URI of the document being returned is.
- a link to a document which is suggested to put the current request in 
context. eg. a description.

Doing this would not break anything for normal web users, or linked data 
hackers. The people it would hit hardest are the people who are doing 
extremely clever rarefied stuff with linked data. They are the minority 
and not a priority. I'd like to see WWW-TAG ensure they can still do the 
cool stuff, but not be afraid of forcing the early adopters to adapt a 
little.


On 03/04/12 14:04, Harry Halpin wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 2:26 PM, Ed Summers<ehs@pobox.com>  wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 7:25 AM, Kingsley Idehen<kidehen@openlinksw.com>  wrote:
>>> 303 hasn't stopped facebook adding 850 million+ Linked Data profiles to the
>>> Web. We still talk about Linked Data as though its just starting when in
>>> fact its already reached critical mass etc.. DBpedia, LOD Cloud etc..
>>> combined with Facebook and Schema.org == way beyond critical mass :-)
>> Perhaps this is where you were going, but I think it's important to
>> point out that Facebook and publishers of Open Graph data ignore
>> httpRange-14 entirely, which is probably why it is working. For
>> example:
>>
>>     http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1182345/
>>
>> identifies a movie:
>>
>>     https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/og/object?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt1182345%2F
>>
>> Thanks for your email Harry!
> Precisely. Indeed, while no-one *forces* you to use 303 redirection,
> you currently have to use it to count as Linked Data. Which leaves
> Linked Data to the true believers like Kingsley, while lots of people
> probably just want to mint RDF data using APIs etc.
>
> For the time being, http://graph.facebook.com/117527568273199
> illustrates my point (note that its also in JSON), and I want that to
> *count* as Linked Data. Right now that URI identifies *both* metadata
> about the movie and the movie itself. If/when Facebook wishes to mint
> a separate URI for the "metadata about the movie" from 'the movie
> itself" they should be able to, and then use w3c:describes OR 303
> redirection to connect the two URIs.
>
> As for the fact that might break OWL reasoners and semantics, I don't
> really care -  as one of the people who has done owl:sameAs reasoning
> on a large scale, you basically have to re-code everything in special
> purpose code to make things scalable (regardless of all the hype over
> decidable reasoning), so "OWL semantics" is kinda meaningless for
> practical purposes and as we have also shown, owl:sameAs is used in
> very odd contexts beyond strict identity all over the place.
>
> I'm happy to talk philosophy (and have several papers about this) in
> an academic context, but from an engineering point of view I'd just
> like Linked Data to work. While Linked Data cloud is kinda huge, its
> not nearly as big as it *could* be if we did two things 1) replaced
> RDF/XML with a JSON format and 2) gave people easier options than 303
> redirections. I think those are the two major deployment barriers.
>
>     cheers,
>           harry
>
>
>> //Ed
>>

-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248

/ Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
/ Web Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
/ Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/

Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2012 14:45:08 UTC