On 11/4/10 12:33 PM, Harry Halpin wrote:
On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Ian Davis<[email protected]> 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
In a purely personal capacity, I like the approach of just using 200,
i.e. with RDFa or whatever, rather than 303. If we want to
disambiguate URIs, the IRW ontology [1] offers a nice class called
"nonInformationResource" and "InformationResource" that one can use to
disambiguate. See this paper [2] on "an Ontology of Resources for
Linked Data" for a walk-through example.
My reasoning is not architectural, but simply efficiency. It is rather
inefficient to have a redirection in the form of a 303 if one can get
the same info without using 303.
Yes, and a valid reason for making your choice :-) But as you state
clearly, it remains a choice with regards to preferred technique.
All:
Where is the pointer (or URL) for a document that mandates 303's? The
sense here being: 303 redirection as the only technique for delivering
HTTP based Resolvable Names re. Linked Data.
Note that Microsoft's oData may one day be a serious competitor to
Linked Data, and if you asked many programmers and open data people
who are not already committed to RDF if they would use Atom + HTTP GET
and no redirects over RDF/XML and a weird 303 redirect, I think the
answer would be rather self-evident.
Microsoft doesn't see OData as Linked Data (the concept) competition.
They see it as an alternative format for representing Linked Data via
E-A-V model graphs :-) As you can see, in this universe of ours,
everything is connected, nothing exist in absolute isolation.
Some key points re. OData;
1. It models electronic records rather than real world objects
2. OData modeling ultimately matches any modeling that fails to
distinguish a Web Resource from a Real World Object (any Entity that
exists in some form outside the Web medium) via fixation -- overt or
inadvertent -- on two-thirds of the Referent, Identifier, Resource trinity.
[1]http://ontologydesignpatterns.org/ont/web/irw.owl
[2]http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2009/papers/ldow2009_paper19.pdf
Links:
1. http://dbpedia.org/page/Paris -- notice OData and friends (Atom or
JSON variants) in the footer of this HTML+RDFa resource
2. http://dbpedia.org/describe/?uri=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris
3. http://uriburner.com/describe/?uri=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris
-- Ditto
4.
http://dbpedia-live.openlinksw.com/describe/?uri=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris
-- Ditto
5.
http://lod.openlinksw.com/describe/?uri=http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris --
Ditto .
Cheers,
Ian
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
