- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:22:44 -0500
- To: Charles White <Charles.White@networkinference.com>
- Cc: www-webont-wg@w3.org, Jack Berkowitz <Jack.Berkowitz@networkinference.com>, Rob Shearer <Rob.Shearer@networkinference.com>
On Fri, 2003-08-22 at 18:42, Charles White wrote: > All, > > A note from one our engineers. > > charles > -----Original Message----- > From: Rob Shearer > Sent: 22 August 2003 07:46 > To: Jack Berkowitz; Engineering; Paul Turner; Matthew Quinlan > Subject: RE: OWL guide note? > > > My main concern is not in what the file extension is, but that > in making the change from .owl to .rdf the authors of the OWL > Guide have tried to hedge their bets and try going without any > extension at all. The "imports" statements in the ontologies > now reference a URLs that do not include *any* extensions. > > However, the Guide continues to reference the food and wine > files *with* an extension, now ".rdf". That seems like the source of the problem. I hope to investigate further. > So if we load "wine.rdf", it imports "food", which in turn > imports "wine", a completely *different* URL. They've added > xml:base attributes such that the new statements from "wine" > should be exact duplicates of everything in "wine.rdf", but > the fact that we're now dealing with three files instead of > two just seems silly. > > Much worse, this "two URLs for the wine file" thing is a huge > pain to configure. Maybe the W3C server guys managed to set up > two URLs for the same file, and made sure that the MIME type > mapping for the file without an extension must be RDF (since > the server can no longer automatically infer it from the > extension), but are server admins going to want to go through > such shenanigans for every ontology they publish? One doesn't need to configure every ontology, or even every MIME type. We use apache, and it's just a one-line config file change, I think, to have requests for file_foo serviced with the contents of file_foo.ext . Details to follow... > And if you want to load an ontology not from a web server but > from a local file this sequence gets even worse, particular on > filesystems which don't allow symbolic links (which, > incidentally, are exactly those file systems on which > extensions are most important). How will Cerebra be able to > load the food and wine ontologies from local files on a > Windows machine? If you're changing the address from http://www.w3.org... to file://... you can change the extension while you're at it. But the smart thing to do is to build caching mechanisms into your product so that it can map http://... names to local files. Hmm... I ought to write this up as a best practice note/FAQ in the ESW wiki... http://esw.w3.org/topic/ . > > Getting these ".rdf" extensions back into the "imports" lines > is probably by far the easiest solution. While that might be the locally easiest solution, the point of doing work in W3C is to optimize globally. -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Thursday, 28 August 2003 13:25:13 UTC