Re: httpRange-14 Change Proposal

On Mon, 2012-04-23 at 08:33 -0400, Jonathan A Rees wrote:
> Dear signers,
> 
> On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 5:47 AM, Jeni Tennison <jeni@jenitennison.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Please find below a Change Proposal for the consideration of the TAG
> > [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ognNNOIcghga9ltQdoi-CvbNS8q-dOzJjhMutJ7_vZo/edit
> 
> I find that this proposal (and some of the others) as written beats
> around the bush a bit. As written it does not seem it will make anyone
> happy, either the 'informationists' (who want to use URIs to refer to
> the content) or the 'descriptionists' (who want the content to be
> taken at face value, i.e. you read the content to figure out what the
> URI refers to).

FYI, I've started drafting a new proposal based on
http://www.w3.org/wiki/UriDefinitionDiscoveryProtocol 
but with modifications including:

 - indicating that an HTTP 200 response with RDF content containing an
rdfs:isDefinedBy statement for the target URI should trump any implicit
URI definition;

 - eliminating the term "information resource";

 - clearly specifying the scope as "http" and "https" schemes, the HTTP
protocol, and RDF-related applications.

 - tightening the verbiage, using RFC 2119 terms, etc.; and

 - changing from "URI" to "IRI" throughout.

Anyone willing to help please email me.

> 
> If you just withdraw one prior agreement (httpRange-14) and do not
> replace it with something else, then there is no prior agreement
> between sender and receiver, and a responsible sender would have to
> assume the worst, i.e. that the receiver is hostile and predisposed to
> interpret the URI in a way different from whatever might be intended.
> (I'm referring to the important case where there is no describedBy
> articulated in a way that can be found by all receivers.) 

But that is not the right criterion.   Hostile receivers are
irrelevant, as anything can be misinterpreted if that is one's intent.
The architecture only needs to facilitate communication among
*cooperating* parties, in particular:

  For cooperating statement authors and consumers, when a
  statement author publishes some RDF statements involving a
  target URI, a statement consumer reading those statements can
  determine the URI definition, for the target URI, that the
  statement author used when the statements were written.

For reasons of efficiency and scalability a third cooperating role is
introduced: the URI owner.  This introduces two more requirements:

 (a) the URI owner must be able to provide an arbitrarily 
 precise URI definition; and
 
 (b) the URI owner must be able to be unambiguous about which 
 URI definition was intended.



-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect those of his employer.

Received on Monday, 23 April 2012 14:52:15 UTC