Re: comments? mirrors.txt (aka site metadata)

> 
> RDF was supposed to address these things. I think it's the right approach,
> because you need a general model for metadata, multiple ways to express it
> (in XML, in HTTP headers, etc.), and a way to combine metadata from
> multiple sources to come up with a definitive view of the world.
> Unfortunately, it has moved on to grander schemes before solving these
> simple problems.
> 

Mark, I agree with most of your statements, but I might suggest that 
another way to look at the problem is as a URI resolution problem.

Rather than trying to describe a "mirror" for a link, I think a more 
consistent approach is to provide pointers to a URI resolver for that link.

In the Content-Addressable Web, we use the THTTP resolvers specified in 
RFC 2169 to do things like:

I2N - From a given URI, discover a URN.  So we take 
http://foo.com/bigfile.tgz and discover 
urn:sha1:ASDLFKJWEROI23U4OKASJDFLAKSJFD

I2Ls - From a given URI, discover alternate URLs.  So we take the above 
'urn:sha1:ASDLFKJWEROI23U4OKASJDFLAKSJFD' and discover a list of URLs 
that mirror the data specified by that URN.

Thus, I think it would be very useful to use RDF to describe URI 
resolution services, as well as serializing equivilence relationships 
between URIs.

> BTW, we ran into problems very similar to these with metadata at Akamai;
> one of the outcomes of that was URISpace
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/urispace.html). It's probably too heavyweight for
> your particular project, but you might find it interesting. I've been
> thinking of expressing entire Web site configurations (Apache .conf files,
> P3P.xml, robots info, etc.) in URISpace, and then writing a transform to
> create the appropriate configuration files from one source. Anybody
> interested?

Very nice.  This solves a problem that I was beating my head against for 
describing a given resolver service as pertaining to a set of URIs.

Could you briefly describe the differences/similarities between this and 
XPath???

Thanks,

-- 
Justin Chapweske, Onion Networks
http://onionnetworks.com/

Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2003 13:08:30 UTC