xml-dev - Re: What should a namespace URI point to?

[Dan Brickley <Daniel.Brickley@bristol.ac.uk>]

On Sat, 30 Dec 2000, Tim Bray wrote:

> I think that if you got a group of qualified people, mostly
> computer programmers, together, you could cook, in a few 
> weeks, cook up a nice little markup vocabulary containing:
> 
> 1. a few basic chunks of XHTML 

Something like http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml-basic-20001219/ ?

> 2. the simple XLink element (I don't think you need extended, and 
>    by using simple you could graft the whole thing onto an XHTML
>    <div> or some such).
>
> 3. a namespace in which are defined a bunch of reserved 
>    role attribute values

(can't help wondering what we'd put at the namespace uri...)

> These things would look like web pages and would display
> nicely in a browser.  The idea is that the xlinks would
> point to related resources of various types.  The role
> namespace would contain precooked values for various
> kinds of related resources (e.g. css stylesheet, xsd
> schema, dtd) whose use is widespread enough to achieve
> some consensus.  Obviously, you could have links to 
> more than one dtd or xsd or whatever.
> 
> I think this would be the ideal kind of thing to retrieve
> when you dereference a namespace URI.  Readable by humans
> and also machine-processable and fully extensible.
> 
> If I were feeling particularly grandiose, I'd also describe
> such a thing as a key building block for the Semantic Web.
> 
> But it would have to be done low, fast, and under the radar...

Sounds like a good plan; and not so far what we've already seen deployed
for RSS and Dublin Core.

One ingredient I'd chuck into the mix is http://www.w3.org/TR/xlink2rdf/
since it gives me a handy way of representing XLink typed links as RDF
(and vice versa):

[[
	Both XLink and RDF provide a way of asserting relations between
	resources. RDF is primarily for describing resources and
       their relations, while XLink is primarily for specifying and
	traversing hyperlinks. However, the overlap between the two is
       sufficient that a mapping from XLink links to statements in an
	RDF model can be defined. Such a mapping allows XLink
       elements to be harvested as a source of RDF statements. XLink
	links (hereafter, "links") thus provide an alternate syntax for
       RDF information that may be useful in some situations. 
]]

Dan