On 11/4/10 1:51 PM, Nathan wrote:
Ian Davis wrote:
Hi all,
The subject of this email is the title of a blog post I wrote last
night questioning whether we actually need to continue with the 303
redirect approach for Linked Data. My suggestion is that replacing it
with a 200 is in practice harmless and that nothing actually breaks on
the web. Please take a moment to read it if you are interested.
http://iand.posterous.com/is-303-really-necessary
Ian,
Please, don't.
303 is a PITA, and it has detrimental affects across the board from
network load through to server admin. Likewise #frag URIs have there
own set of PITA features (although they are nicer on the network and
servers).
However, and very critically (if you can get more critical than
critical!), both of these patterns / constraints are here to ensure
that different things have different names, and without that
distinction our data is junk.
This goes beyond your and my personal opinions, or those of anybody
here, the constraints are there so that in X months time when
"multi-corp" trawls the web, analyses it and releases billions of
statements saying like { </foo> :hasFormat "x"; sioc:about
dbpedia:Whatever } about each doc on the web, that all of those
statements are said about documents, and not about you or I, or
anything else real, that they are said about the right "thing", the
correct name is used.
And this is critically important, to ensure that in X years time when
somebody downloads the RDF of 2010 in a big *TB sized archive and
considers the graph of RDF triples, in order to make sense of some
parts of it for something important, that the data they have isn't
just unreasonable junk.
It's not about what we say something is, it's about what others say
the thing is, and if you 200 OK the URIs you currently 303, then it
will be said that you are a document, as simple as that. Saying you
are a document isn't the killer, it's the hundreds of other statements
said along side that which make things so ambiguous that the info is
useless.
If 303s are killing you then use fragment URIs, if you refuse to use
fragments for whatever reason then use something new like tdb:'s,
support the data you've published in one pattern, or archive it and
remove it from the web.
But, for whatever reasons, we've made our choices, each has pro's and
cons, and we have to live with them - different things have different
name, and the giant global graph is usable. Please, keep it that way.
Best,
Nathan
AMEN!
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
