Saturday, May 13, 2006

 

Metadata in URIs

An important W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) finding has just come out entitled "Metadata in URIs". For those who have heard some of my presentations, you know that I am in favor of "semantic identifiers" in support of the notion of "semantic chains". My justification for both ideas is based upon the understanding that "semantics are infinite" and that applications need "just enough semantics" to get the job done. Given that it is crucial to deliver semantics in small quantities at the closest point to the user in conjunction with a link back to a larger pool of metadata. The document has a great example about URIs used in the public that I feel highlights the point well. Highly recommended reading...

Comments:
In quad stores (such as Sesame2), you could use the "context quad" as an URI to add additional metadata about the triple.

Traditionally, the context has been used as a URI to "reify" the triple in a statement (S,P,O,C).. but what if you used it to add additional info?

For example:
(KevinSmith, authorOf, http://trumantruck.com/, http://urihack?confidenceLevel=HIGH&authorOfStatement=MikeDaconta&tripleDate=20060512)

Just an idea. Would seem to work with a SPARQL query.. What do you think?
 
Hi Kevin,
While this is slightly different than the intent of the TAG finding (it was not generally talking about the query parameters) ... I think it is a perfectly acceptable use of a URI.
My one concern is that this would circumvent any structure being placed on a single way to provide context for the triple. So, while I think a Quad structure is better than the triple structure. I would prefer, one single way to do context that is flexible enough to handle multiple context attributes. So, I would like to see some simple pointer scheme to a special set of reified triples all grouped as "context".
 
Yes - I realize that this is different, and waaay off topic. I should have created a new thread.

I call this "informational context". It could be a URI that doesn't necessarily uniquely identify the triple, but provides attribute-value pair information about a triple.

At the same time, the URI could be a servlet URI that could return the triples associated with the attribute value pairs.

For example, a URL:

http://www.trumantruck.com/urihack?att1=val1&att2=val2

could return all triples that have those attribute-value pairs in their context.
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?