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Patrick Stickler wrote:
> On 2002-02-14 18:28, "ext Jonathan Borden" <jborden@attbi.com> wrote:
>
>
> > I will respond to this statement from Patrick Stickler's prior email:
> >
> > [[
> > The problem here is that if I dereference some URI expecting to
> > access that actual resource, and get some metadata or RDDL document
> > or something else in its place, how do I necessarily know that
> > that is *not* in fact the resource? It may not actually be apparent
> > from the mnemmonic qualities of the URI, and such qualities are
> > unlikely to be meaningful to some software application.
> > ]]
> >
> > Let me try to say this as clearly as possible:
> >
> > When you dereference a URI you NEVER get back the _resource_. Never
ever.
>
> That may be true for 'http:' URI denoted resources, but not for
> all URI denoted resources.
>
> > You get back a representation of the resource. Certainly in the special
case
> > of the "data:" scheme, the representation and the resource are
essentially
> > defined to be one and the same,
>
> My point exactly.
>
> > but in the case of the "http" scheme for
> > example, this is not the case.
>
> Ahh. Then we agree.
>
> > The RDDL document which describes a namespace IS NOT EVER the namespace.
>
> Then it shouldn't be returned. If it's not the resource, it's not the
> resource, and for GET to return something that is not the resource is IMO
a
> logical error.
See prior message. The semantics of HTTP GET are defined in RFC 2616. It
returns an "entity" not a "resource" by definition. Don't like it? Don't use
HTTP. RDDL does, however, follow the rules of the relevent URIs and W3C
recommendations when people do chose to use namespaces having the "http"
scheme (it should be noted that this is the most common type of URI in
actual use)
Is RDDL a long term solution? I don't know. It will be useful as long as
HTML browsers are the most popular types of user agents. I am prefectly
happy to accept that, and reevaluate the situation if the Web proves itself
to radically change in the future.
For the record I _am_ a proponent of the "Semantic Web" and not afraid to
say so. I also firmly believe that "AI" become useful in the future, perhaps
in the next decade if the available processing power continues to increase
at the present rate. Evidence for this view:
1) Voice recognition is now used on a daily basis in some areas of medicine.
2) Such techniques have been in daily use in err... government programs ...
for perhaps several decades (at _great_ computing cost)
3) It is no coindicence that DARPA funded the current Web Ontology language
(DAML).
4) Data mining has an increasing role in corporate and commercial networks.
5) Altavista and Google can be considered relatively simple "AI" programs of
sorts
I expect that one of the killer apps of voice recognition will be in the
lowly HTML browser and suspect that corporations with deep pockets (e.g.
Microsoft) are betting on the same horse.
So look what great things have been accomplished by the "lowly" HTTP
protocol and HTML browser. I am more than happy to tie RDDL to that
bandwagon, at least for the time being.
Jonathan
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