Peter Ansell wrote:
On 15/11/2007, Mark Wilkinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Xiaoshu, This is a beautiful synopsis of the problem - THANK YOU for
taking the time to write it up as well as you did! I will be using this
in my lectures for sure! :-)
What made me chuckle was how similar the DFDF concept is to the LSID
concept... except that the LSID doesn't rely on any HTTP response codes to
determine what is what (it's all explicit, since there is no way to ask a
URI what it is but to query the metadata; and there is no concept of
content-negotiation in LSIDs since all various representations should be
referred to explicitly in the metadata... so there are no shortcuts to
getting the representation that you desire)
Given that we have millions (billions?) of URLs out there in the world,
isn't it a bit optimistic to assume that they will all suddenly become
adherent to whatever we decide here?
Personally, I am inclined to place my trust in a Semantic Web where I know
that the URIs I encounter are guarateed to have the behaviour that I
expect. If I can't guarantee that from a URL (and I know that I can't),
then I can at least code my software to be more trusting of other kinds of
URIs... and non-trusting of URLs...
...na?
M
Personally I think the plain old HTTP REST proposals which include the
data type in the URL are more valuable than a philosophical statement
about the difference between information and non-information
resources. They do not need to worry about response codes because you
know what you asked for in the URL, by default getting metadata which
provides the information about the other REST url's which will return
different formats.
The data type (Content-Type) is still there, no? Honestly, one of the
reasons that I wrote the article is to show that there isn't any
difference between Information Resource vs. non-IR. Even if there were,
it is a very arbitrary one. What is informational is URI, not resource.
I think many of us got it wrong in the past, including myself.
In the case that you actually want to use Semantic Web Enhanced HTML
pages you still have problems but they are not related to definitions
of which resource is which as the paper seems to argue. RDFa, meta
tags and link rel="alternate" seem to be valid solutions for putting
semantics inside HTML. XSLT stylesheets can be used to style RDF into
HTML as an alternative.
Do you have any scientifically relevant semantics that can't be
represented by enhancing HTML,
Well, first, unless we assume that machine can understand human
languages, then sure anything written in an HTML can somehow be
converted to RDF....but I guess that is not in the near future.
or by using a strictly RDF directing
URL as an identifier with other information being directed to from
there? It is not hard to utilise resources if you know identifiers are
going to return RDF, or HTML pages will have link rel=alternate in
them.
I am kind of lost here....can you use an example?
Xiaoshu
