Re: [Visionaries] The Relative Semantic Web

[Peter Minten]

Norbert Bollow wrote:
> 
> Peter Minten <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > ...". I tried solving it by locating the server based on the URI, it's not
> > elegant though, since if I wanted to put information about DotGNU on my own
> > webspace I wouldn't have the nice dotgnu.org part in it that signals to 
> > users
> > immediately what it's about.
> 
> Why is putting stuff in a directory called "dotgnu" not good enough?

Ahem, directories are part of a tree structure. RDF triples are two points
connected by an arc, an RDF web is thus a graph, but not a specific type like a
tree.

But I guess you mean why wouldn't I use <silvernerd.foo.bar>.forum.howitworks?
Well, that would be an address of it too. The RDF spec says every node has
exactly one unique absolute address (URI), which is not such a bad idea. I say
every node can have an unlimited amount of relative addresses.

It obviously has many advantages being able to get to a certain location using
many different paths. An important one is that without relative addressing it's
hard to store paths in the web.
 
> > The internet today works with central DNS servers and assigned
> > domains by powerful authorities. I believe this system is weak, if
> > somebody would take over the authorities it would be easy enough to
> > cause major damage.
> 
> I agree that this is a problem, but I think that trying to fix it is
> probably outside the scope of DotGNU.

Ok, I agree with that. However a RDF routing authority will be needed unless you
want to start every link path with a complete uri. We can't exercise much
control over what the routing authorities will do, everybody can however start
one. This is not something extra, it's something inherent to the way the
resolver of GNU.RDF works, so it's a side effect.

But you're right that we shouldn't work on the routing authority system aside
from what's in the scope of DotGNU.

> > databases. So my stuff about how Forum works could be located at
> > dotgnu!people!PeterMinten!forum!howitworks (yes, a bang path :-)
> 
> I think bang paths are not very suitable for human consumption...
> certianly not better than URIs.

Hmm, yes. Well, I'll replace the bang with the dot. This scheme will need to be
assimilated into link path anyway so I might as well stick to the dot for it.

I'm still thinking of a modification of the RDF syntax needed to support this. I
think a name attribute in node descriptions would do the trick: 

<rdf:Bag>
  <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://example.edu/students/Amy"; rdf:name="Amy"/>
  <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://example.edu/students/Tim"; rdf:name="Tim"/>
  <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://example.edu/students/John"; rdf:name="John"/>
  <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://example.edu/students/Mary"; rdf:name="Mary"/>
  <rdf:li rdf:resource="http://example.edu/students/Sue"; rdf:name="Sue"/>
</rdf:Bag>

Note that the name attribute is different from the label attribute in the sense
that label is used to provide a human readable representation of a _resource_
and name is used to provide a human readable, but restricted (no dot allowed),
representation of a _triple_.

Greetings,

Peter