[rdfweb-dev] Fwd: uri as name or link to another rdf?

[Jan Grant]

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Danny Ayers wrote:

>
> > >> I still don't get one basic RDF issue
> > >> right: How should any rdf reader (person or agent) know whether the
> > >> uri "http://www.schemaweb.info/parser/license.xml" is just a name for
> > >> a thing or whether you should look at that uri, do a HTTP-GET and
> > >> interpret (here: parse XML, internalize RDF) what you get? I haven'd
> > >> found that basic distinction.
>
> Hmm, I guess the question is why you'd want to try a GET. In theory they are
> just identifiers, but in practice you may want to scutter along them.

This is the problem. Sometimes they're just names. Sometimes they're
addresses. Sometimes they refer to the thing "described" by content that
can be dereferenced via a URL (eg, dc.author). Sometimes they refer to a
particular rendering of that description (eg:byteSize).

If you take the view that the thing "named" by a URI is not the same as
the content at that address; but that (via content-negotiation) you can
receive a description of that thing from that address, you do OK most of
the time. You still need something else to deal with the "size in bytes"
case, but I'd say that you're in a reasonably strong position. In
particular, I might use

	http://ioctl.org/jan/

to _denote_ myself - and argue that there's a description (in the
poetic, rather than strictly logical, sense) of the thing so denoted at
and by that URI.

Obviously that would preclude me saying

	http://ioctl.org/jan/	dc:creator	_:x

where _:x is anything other than me dear ol' mum and dad :-)


-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
We thought time travel was impossible. But that was now and this is then.