[rdfweb-dev] Re: [syndication] seeAlso

[Jan Grant]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Andy Powell wrote:

> On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Dan Brickley wrote:
>
> > * Julian Bond <julian_bond at voidstar.com> [2003-07-23 08:00+0100]
> > > One of the powerful ideas in FOAF is the widespread use of rdfs:seeAlso
> > >
> > > Could this be usefully applied in RSS?
> >
> > It can be used in any RDF-based format whenever you've mentioned
> > something and want to reference more (typically machine-processable, RDF)
> > info about it elsewhere in the Web.
>
> I assume that the semantics of seeAlso are pretty loose - i.e. you can use
> it to point to anything, some more RDF, some XML, an HTML page, a PDF file
> or whatever?  I.e. in some cases you are getting something
> machine-readable, in other cases you aren't.
>
> I have never understood why, in a semantically rich environment like RDF,
> one would want to use such semantically fuzzy properties.  Why not use a
> more precise property like 'additionalRDF' (a sub-property of seeAlso) if
> that is what you mean?

Well amongst other things RDF only has "fuzzy" indirection anyway: that
a URL denotes a resource that you can get by doing an HTTP transaction
addressed to the name of the resource is only a convention.
Not sure if dereference semantics are built into any bits of foaf?

	http://ioctl.org/jan/ rdf:type eg:WebPage
	http://ioctl.org/jan/ web:instanceAt _:x

	_:x rdf:type web:HTTPTransaction
	_:x web:verb "GET"
	_:x web:acceptMime "text/html"
	_:x web:url "http://ioctl.org/jan/"^^xsd:URI

and so on. Ideally (or anti-ideally?) you'd want a full model that
captures the "subjectivity" of http transactions and instances of those
transactions ("here's how the page looked when I fetched it...")

Must be a full moon,
jan

-- 
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.