[rdfweb-dev] isPrimaryTopicOf and homepage

[Jan Grant]

On Sat, 30 Jul 2005, Masahide Kanzaki wrote:

> Hi Alex, thanks for your comment.
> 
> At 9:21 AM -0400 05.7.29, Alex Stewart wrote:
> >Rather, it looks like a page that you've created. I say this because
> ><http://www.kanzaki.com/> (at least the English version) does not
> >contain any information about you, but rather it contains information
> >about Arts & Books, Japan, and Metadata & the Sematic Web.
> 
> Hmmm... there are several definitions on what is 'homepge', actually. Well,
> FOAF spec says 'as such one might look to a homepage for information on its
> owner from its owner', indeed. Same as what you pointed out.
> 
> But if a homepage is the 'page' that contains information about a person or
> organization etc., then the homepage of W3C is
> http://www.w3.org/Consortium/ rather than http://www.w3.org/... right ? As
> such, I have my personal information page in my site, so should I write as
> bellow ?
> 
> [a foaf:Person; foaf:name "Masahide Kanzaki";
>  foaf:homepage <http://www.kanzaki.com/info/who> ] .
> 
> 
> I've thought common meaning of 'homepage' was the entry page of one's
> website (or site itself). I have my website that contains documents on what
> I'm doing, and whose entry page is http://www.kanzaki.com/, so I thought it
> was my homepage.
> 
> A quick search shows that many people use foaf:homepage for their sites'
> top page (as I do), while some others for their profile pages...
> 
> I'm really not sure..

Time to roll this argument out then. REST (and the TAG) claim that a 
url's denotation is tied (in the cases where you can "dereference" such 
a URL) to what you get when you dereference it: that is, 
http://example.org/someImage "denotes" the image, some representation of 
which you receive by making the http request.

Which is a good way to the point of view that
	http://ioctl.org/jan/
is a URI which could be said to "denote" me - that is, when a browser is 
used to dereference it, what you get is a representation or a 
description (in the loosest, fairly liberal poetic interpretation of 
that word) of the thing it denotes - that is, me.

Indeed I assert that that's exactly what that URI does denote. Who's to 
say otherwise?

And if you buy that then I've a coherent definition of "homepage" -

A homepage of an entity X, is the content (not the URL) available (in 
whatever form, and possibly that content is variable) by dereferencing 
a URL that is used to denote X.

A consequence of adopting this is this:

http://ioctl.org/jan/   foaf:homepage    {some literal content here}

or if you prefer to talk about urls as being the "value" of a homepage,

http://ioctl.org/jan/	foaf:homepage	"http://ioctl.org/jan/"^^<xsd:uri>

Anyhoo-
Have a good weekend,
jan


-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44 (0)117 9287088 or 3317661   http://ioctl.org/jan/
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