On 3/27/12 7:59 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:
This seems an appropriate place for me to drop in my 2 cents.I like the 303 trick. People that care about this stuff can use it (and appear to be doing so), but it doesn't really matter too much that people that don't care don't use it. It seems analogous to the question of HTML validity. Best practices suggest creating valid markup, but if it isn't perfect, it's not a big deal, most UAs will be able to make sense of it. There will be reduced fidelity of communication, sure, but there will be imperfections in the system whatever, so any trust/provenance chain will have to consider such issues anyway. So I don't really think Jeni's proposal is necessary, but don't feel particularly strongly one way or the other. Philosophically I reckon the flexibility of what a representation of a resource can be means that the notion of an IR isn't really needed. I've said this before in another thread somewhere, but if the network supported the media type "thing/dog" then it would be possible to GET http://example.org/Basil with full fidelity. Right now it doesn't, but I'd argue that what you could get with media type "image/png" would still be a valid, if seriously incomplete representation of my dog. In other words, a description of a thing shares characteristics with the thing itself, and that's near enough for HTTP representation purposes. Cheers, Danny.
Amen!!We have resources that just 'mention' or 'refer' to *things* loosely i.e., you typical Web page. RDF introduce resources that explicitly 'describe' unambiguously named *things* via URIs. RDFS & OWL introduces resources that explicitly 'define' unambiguously named *things* such as classes and properties via URIs. Linked Data (or Hyperdata0 introduces resources that explicitly 'describe' and 'define' unambiguously named *things* via de-referencable URIs.
When all is said an done, all of the above boils down to *representation fidelity* that one could order (hierarchically) as follows:
1. generic representation -- Web Pages2. description oriented representation -- RDF which may or may not follow Linked Data principles 3. definition oriented representation -- RDFS, OWL, which may or may not follow Linked Data principles.
BTW -- I've published a work in progress post [1] that includes some diagrams (including the original WWW proposal depiction) re. Data, Documents, Content, URIs, and URLs.
Links: 1. http://goo.gl/DRvQM -- Understanding Data . -- Regards, Kingsley Idehen Founder& CEO OpenLink Software Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen
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