On 3/26/12 3:22 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:
Hi,On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 7:59 PM, Kingsley Idehen<[email protected]> wrote:On 3/26/12 2:09 PM, Leigh Dodds wrote:Hi Kingsley, On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 6:38 PM, Kingsley Idehen<[email protected]> wrote:... Leigh, Everything we've built in the Linked Data realm leverages the findings of HttpRange-14 re. Name/Address (Reference/Access) disambiguation. Our Linked Data clients adhere to these findings. Our Linked Data servers do the same.By "we" I assume you mean OpenLink. Here's where I asked the original question [1]. Handily Ian Davis published an example resource that returns a 200 OK when you de-reference it [2].Support was done (basically reusing our old internal redirection code) whenever that post was made by Ian.I just tested that in URI Burner [3] and it gave me broadly what I'd expect, i.e. the resources mentioned in the resulting RDF. I didn't see any visible breakage. Am I seeing fall-back behaviour?As per comment above its implemented. We have our own heuristic for handling self-describing resources. My concern is that what we've done isn't the norm i.e., I don't see others working that way, instinctively. You have to be over the Linked Data comprehension hump to be in a position emulate what we've done.OK, I thought you might have done, so thanks for the confirmation. But this further demonstrates that we don't necessarily need redirects.
No, no...That isn't a case for invalidating 303 redirection. It simply proves that a different heuristic could be applied to the handling of slash URIs that identify description (or descriptor) document subjects. The only issue with the heuristic (a dog-fooding exercise) is that it heightens rather than simplifies entry into the realm of Linked Data.
Linked Data (as per TimBL's meme) straddles a very delicate balance between what's already in the Web i.e., lots of named documents that loosely 'mention' many named entities and what should increasingly be added to the Web i.e., lots of named documents that explicitly describe unambiguously named subjects (entities). The challenge is pulling this off unobtrusively.
When someone refers to me on the Web via my blog home page, they aren't in anyway inferring that I am a Web page, they make a human comprehensible inference at the point when they make that claim. The same applies to the read of the Web document that holds that reference. For this to work at the machine-to-machine level there has to be machine level disambiguation which is what you get via 303 redirection for this specific slash URI scenario en route to similar inference. What I just described isn't really delivered with the same degree of unobtrusiveness following a 200 OK for a subject that isn't an Web document, there is additional indirection in play, it just doesn't happen over the wire, but introduces a cost all the same on two fronts:
1. encourages people to identity description subjects ambiguously2. force people to understand relation semantics en route to exploiting Linked Data.
Now, for a Semantic Web proper solution, the 303 alternative is much more natural since in this particular scenario the clients and servers are totally driven by relation semantics.
To conclude, Linked Data is a vital stepping stone (ground zero so to speak) en route to the Semantic Web nirvana. It isn't the Semantic Web in all its potential glory. It sits between coarse-grained structured data and fine-grained structured data woven together via semantically rich relations, leveraging hyperlinks.
There's a thin line here that's the root of this permathread :-)
.... Are people really testing status codes and changing subsequent processing behaviour because of that? It looks like there's little or no breakage in Sindice for example [3]. Based on Tim's comments he has been doing that, are other people doing the same? And if you have to ask if we're not, then who is this ruling benefiting?We do the same, but we also go beyond (i.e., what you call a fall-back).Would you care to elaborate on that? i.e: what inferences are you deriving from the protocol interaction?
Meaning, we have a fallback. Basically, we look at the Content-Location: header as I described in an old post [1].
I can see that for a .txt document you are inferring that its a foaf:Document [1]. I'm still also interested to hear from others. [1]. http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/about/html/http/www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76.txt
Links:1. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Nov/0237.html -- heuristic explained 2. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Nov/0258.html -- ditto.
Kingsley
Cheers, L.
-- 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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