Copyright © 2007 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark and document use rules apply.
The Resource Description Framework RDF allows the users to describe Web documents and resources from the real world—people, organisations, things—in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on the Web creates the Semantic Web. URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) are very important, forming the link between RDF and the Web. This document presents guidelines for their effective use. It discusses two strategies, called 303 URIs and hash URIs. It gives pointers to several Web sites that use these solutions, and briefly discusses why several other proposals have problems.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.
This is a First Public Working Draft of an intended W3C Interest Group Note giving a tutorial explaining decisions of the TAG for newcomers to Semantic Web technologies. It was initially based on the DFKI Technical Memo TM-07-01, Cool URIs for the Semantic Web and was reviewed informally by the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) and the Semantic Web Deployment Group (SWD). This document was developed by the Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group.
Please send comments about this document to [email protected] (with public archive). Publication of this document as an Interest Group Note is planned for 1 February 2008, comments should possibly be sent until 21 January 2008.
Most issues found in TAG and SWD reviews have been addressed, known remaining issues with this document are listed in the changelog section.
Publication as a Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. The group does not expect this document to become a W3C Recommendation. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.
This document is a practical guide for implementers of the RDF specification. It explains two approaches for RDF data hosted on HTTP servers. Intended audiences are Web and ontology developers who have to decide how to model their RDF URIs for use with HTTP. Applications using non-HTTP URIs are not covered. This document is an informative guide covering selected aspects of previously published, detailed technical specifications. We assume that you are familiar with the basics of the RDF data model [RDFPrimer]. We also assume some familiarity with the HTTP protocol [RFC2616]. Wikipedia's article [WP-HTTP] serves as a good primer.
The Semantic Web is envisioned as a decentralised world-wide information space for sharing machine-readable data with a minimum of integration costs. Its two core challenges are the distributed modelling of the world with a shared data model, and the infrastructure where data and schemas can be published, found and used. A basic question is thus how to publish information about resources in a way that allows interested users and software applications to find them.
On the Semantic Web, all information has to be expressed as statements about resources, like the members of the company Example.com are Alice and Bob or Bob's telephone number is "+1 555 262 or this Web page was created by Alice. Resources are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) [RFC3986]. This modelling approach is at the heart of Resource Description Framework (RDF) [RDFPrimer].
@@ check if this explains the semantic web for the intended audience or if more is needed@@
Using RDF, the statements can be published on the website of the company. Others can read the data and publish their own information, linking to existing resources. This forms a distributed model of the world.
At the same time, Web documents have always been addressed with URIs (in common parlance often referred as Uniform Resource Locators, URLs). This is useful because it means we can easily make RDF statements about Web pages, but also dangerous because we can easily mix up Web pages and the things, or resources, described on the page.
So the question is, what URIs should we use in RDF? As an example, to identify the frontpage of the Web site of Example Inc., we may use http://www.example.com/. But what URI identifies the company as an organisation, not a Web site? Do we have to serve any content—HTML pages, RDF files—at those URIs? In this document we will answer these questions according to relevant specifications. We explain how to use URIs for things that are not Web pages, such as people, products, places, ideas and concepts such as ontology classes. We give detailed examples how the Semantic Web can (and should) be realised as a part of the Web.
Let us begin with an example. Assume that Example Inc., a fictional company producing "Extreme Guitar Amplifiers", has a Web site at http://www.example.com/. Part of the site is a white-pages service listing the names and contact details of the employees. Alice and Bob both work at Example Inc.. The structure of the Web site might thus be:
Like everything on the traditional Web, each of the pages mentioned above are Web documents. Every Web document has its own URI. Note that a Web document is not the same as a file: a single Web document can be available in many different formats and languages, and a single file, for example a PHP script, may be responsible for generating a large number of Web documents with different URIs. A Web document is defined as something that has a URI and can return representations (responses in a format such as HTML or JPEG or RDF) of the identified resource in response to HTTP requests. In technical literature, such as Architecture of the World Wide Veb, Volume One [AWWW], the term Information Resource is used instead of Web document.
On the traditional Web, URIs were used primarily for Web documents—to link to them, and to access them in a browser. In short, to locate a Web document—hence the term URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The notion of resource identity was not so important on the traditional Web, a URL simply identifies whatever we see when we type it into a browser.
Web clients and servers use the HTTP protocol [RFC2616] to request representations of Web documents and send back the responses. HTTP has a powerful mechanism for offering different formats and language versions of the same Web document known as content negotiation.
When a user agent (such as a browser) makes an HTTP request, it sends along some HTTP headers to indicate what data formats and language it prefers. The server then selects the best match from its file system or generates the desired content on demand, and sends it back to the client. For example, a browser could send this HTTP request to indicate that it wants an HTML or XHTML version of http://www.example.com/people/alice in English or German:
GET /people/alice HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml Accept-Language: en, de
The server could answer:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/html Content-Language: en
followed by the content of the HTML document in English. Content negotiation [TAG-Alt] is often implemented with a twist: Instead of a direct answer, the server redirects to another URL where the appropriate version is found:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found Location: http://www.example.com/people/alice.en.html
The redirect is indicated by a special Status Code, here 302 Found. The client would now send another HTTP request to the new URL. By having separate URLs for different versions, this approach allows Web authors to link directly to a specific version.
@@DannyAyers: ...and treat them as independent resources? @@Leo: they may be several representions of the same resource, the term "independent" may be misleading.
RDF/XML, the standard serialisation format of RDF, has its own content type, application/rdf+xml. Content negotiation thus allows publishers to serve HTML versions of a Web document to traditional Web browsers and RDF versions to Semantic Web-enabled user agents. This also allows servers to provide alternative RDF serialisation formats like Notation3 [N3] or TriX [TriX].
@@ TAG suggest to rephrase the next sentence to "With the advent of semantic web technologies, the web is extended so that (http:?) URIs can identify not just web documents but also ..
@@ Danny Ayers: It's long been possible to identify things, and
RDF etc aren't strictly necessary
@@ LeoSauermann: hesitate to change the document based on this general comment.
On the Semantic Web, URIs identify not just Web documents, but also real-world objects like people and cars, and even abstract ideas and non-existing things like a mythical unicorn. We call all these real-world objects or (according to WWW-Arch) non-information resources.
@@Danny Ayers: I believe it came in a recent thread on [email protected]
that "non-information resource" wasn't defined in WebArch, though I
haven't checked. If so, should be reworded. My suggestion for rewording is to delete that last sentence
@@ Leo Sauermann: there is no other term offered. Suggestion: remove "(according to WWW.Arch)"
Given such a URI, how can we find out what resource it identifies? We need some way to answer this question, because otherwise it will be hard to achieve interoperability between independent information systems. We could imagine a service where we can look up a description of the identified resource, similar to today's search engines. But such a single point of failure is against the Web's decentralised nature.
Instead, we should use the Web itself—an extremely robust and scalable information publishing system—as a lookup service for resource descriptions. Whenever a URI is mentioned, we can look it up to retrieve a description containing relevant information and links to related data. This is so important that we make it our number one requirement for good URIs:
Let's assume Example Inc. wants to publish contact data of their employees on the Semantic Web so their business partners can import it into their address books. For example, the published data would contain these statements about Alice, written here in N3 syntax [N3]:
<URI-of-alice> a foaf:Person;
foaf:name "Alice";
foaf:mbox <mailto:[email protected]>;
foaf:homepage <http://www.example.com/people/alice> .
What URI should we use instead of the placeholder <URI-of-alice>? Certainly not http://www.example.com/people/alice, because that would confuse a person with a Web document, leading to misunderstandings: Is the homepage of Alice also named “Alice”? Has the homepage an email address? And why has the homepage a homepage? So we need another URI. (For in-depth treatments of this issue, see What HTTP URIs Identify? [HTTP-URI2] and Four Uses of a URL: Name, Concept, Web Location and Document Instance [Booth]).
Therefore our second requirement:
We note that our requirements seem to conflict with each other. If we can't use URIs of documents to identify real-world object, then how can we retrieve a description about real-world objects based on their URI? The challenge is to find a solution that allows us to find the describing documents if we have just the resource's URI, using standard Web technologies.
The following picture shows the desired relationships between a resource and its describing documents:
@@ The next paragraphs address a recommendation by TAG to weaken our "err on the side of caution" recommendation by explaning the problem better. TAG members may verify if their recommendation was met by our explanation.
Above we assumed that there is a distinction between web documents (information resources) andreal-world, non-document objects (non-information resources). The question is where to draw the line between them.
According to W3C guidelines ([AWWW], section 2.2.), we have an information
resource if all its essential characteristics can be conveyed in a
message. Examples are a Web page, an image or a product catalog, which we
call Web documents in this document. The URI identifies both the entity and
indirectly the message that conveys
the characteristics. Real-world objects (non-information resources) are
therefore entities whose characteristics can not be conveyed in a message,
but are entities on their own. The key to understand the difference, is that
an information resource often describes a non-information resource.
For example the person Alice is described in an information resource, Alice's
homepage. We may not like the look of the homepage, but this opinion does not
relate to the person.
The problem now is that web documents are also part of our perceived world, hence they are real-world objects in their own right. The document you are reading right now is an entity of the real world you perceive.
Our recommendation is to err on the side of caution: Whenever an object of interest is not clearly and obviously a document (all its essential characteristics can be conveyed in a message), then it's better to use two distinct URIs, one for the resource and another one for the document describing it.
There are two solutions that meet our requirements for identifying real-world objects: 303 URIs and hash URIs. Which one to use depends on the situation, both have advantages and disadvantages.
The solutions described in the following apply to deployment scenarios in which the RDF data and the HTML data is served separately, such as a standalone RDF/XML document along with an HTML document. The metadata can also be embedded in HTML, using technologies such as RDFa [RDFa Primer], microformats and other documents to which the GRDDL [GRDDL] mechanisms can be applied. In those cases the RDF data is extracted from the returned HTML document.
The first solution is to use “hash URIs” for non-document resources. URIs can contain a fragment, a special part that is separated from the rest of the URI by a hash symbol (“#”).
When a client wants to retrieve a hash URI, then the HTTP protocol requires the fragment part to be stripped off before requesting the URI from the server. This means a URI that includes a hash cannot be retrieved directly, and therefore cannot identify a Web document. But we can use them to identify other, non-document resources, without creating ambiguity.
If Example Inc. adopts this solution, then they could use these URIs to represent the company, Alice, and Bob:
Clients will always strip off the fragment part before requesting any of these URIs, resulting in a request to this URI:
At this URI, Example Inc. could serve an RDF document that contains descriptions of all three resources, using the original hash URIs to identify the resources.
The following picture shows the hash URI approach without content negotiation:
Alternatively, content negotiation (see Section 2.1.) could be employed to redirect from the about URI to separate HTML and RDF documents. Again, the 303 See Other status code must be used. (Otherwise, a client could conclude that the hash URI refers to a part of the HTML document.)
The following picture shows the hash URI approach with content negotiation:
The second solution is to use a special HTTP status code, “303 See Other”, to give an indication that the requested resource is not a regular Web document. Web architecture tells you that for a non-information resource it is inappropriate to return a 200 because there is, in fact, no suitable representation for those resources. However, it is useful to provide information about those resources. The W3C's Technical Architecture Group proposes in its httpRange-14 resolution [httpRange] document a solution that is to direct you to a different (information) resource which can be represented as a document and can give you the information that you want. By doing this we avoid ambiguity between the original, non-information resource and the resource that describes it.
Since 303 is a redirect status code, the server can also give the location of a document that describes the resource. If, on the other hand, a request is answered with one of the usual status codes in the 2XX range, like 200 OK, then the client knows that the URI identifies a Web document.
If Example Inc. adopts this solution, they could use these URIs to represent the company, Alice and Bob:
The Web server would be configured to answer requests to all these URIs with a 303 status code and a Location HTTP header that provides the URL of a document that describes the resource.
The following picture shows the redirects for a possible 303 URI solution:
The server could employ content negotiation (see Section 2.1.) to send either the URL of an HTML description or RDF. HTTP requests for HTML content would be redirected to the HTML URLs we gave in Section 2. Requests for RDF data would be redirected to RDF documents, such as:
Each of the RDF documents would contain statements about the appropriate resource, using the original URI, e.g. http://www.example.com/id/alice, to identify the described resource.
Which approach is better? It depends. The hash URIs have the advantage of reducing the number of necessary HTTP round-trips, which in turn reduces access latency. A family of URIs can share the same non-hash part. The descriptions of http://www.example.com/about#exampleinc, http://www.example.com/about#product123, and http://www.example.com/about# product456 are retrieved with a single request to http://www.example.com/about. However this approach has a downside. A client interested only in #product123 will inadvertently load the data for all other resources as well, because they are in the same file. 303 URIs, on the other hand, are very flexible because the redirection target can be configured separately for each resource. There could be one describing document for each resource, or one large document for all of them, or any combination in between. It is also possible to change the policy later on. But the large number of redirects may cause higher latency.
To address scalability issue with the management of a large set of URIs in case of the 303 solution, the usage of a SPARQL endpoint or comparable services is advised. Note also, that both 303 and Hash can be combined, allowing to spread a large dataset into multiple parts and have an identifier for a non-document resource. An example for a combination of 303 and Hash is:
Any fragment identifier is valid, this in above URI is a suggestion you may want to copy for your implementations.
Hash URIs without content negotiation can be implemented by simply uploading static RDF files to a Web server, without any special server configuration. This makes them popular for quick-and-dirty RDF publication.
303 URIs should be used for large sets of data that are, or may grow, beyond the point where it is practical to serve all related resources in a single document.
If in doubt, it's better to use the more flexible 303 URI approach.
The best resource identifiers don't just provide descriptions for people and machines, but are designed with simplicity, stability and manageability in mind, as explained by Tim Berners-Lee in Cool URIs don't change and by the W3C Team in Common HTTP Implementation Problems (sections 1 and 3):
All the URIs related to a single real-world object—resource identifier, RDF document URL, HTML document URL—should also be explicitly linked with each other to help information consumers understand their relation. For example, in the 303 URI solution for Example Inc., there are three URIs related to Alice:
Two of them are Web document URLs. The RDF document located at http://www.example.com/data/alice might contain these statements (expressed in N3):
<http://www.example.com/id/alice>
foaf:page <http://www.example.com/people/alice>;
rdfs:isDefinedBy <http://www.example.com/data/alice>;
a foaf:Person;
foaf:name "Alice";
foaf:mbox <mailto:[email protected]>;
...
The document makes statements about Alice, the person, using the resource identifier. The first two properties relate the resource identifier to the two document URIs. The foaf:page statement links it to the HTML document. This allows RDF-aware clients to find a human-readable version of the resource, and at the same time, by linking the page to its topic, defines useful metadata about that HTML document. The rdfs:isDefinedBy statement links the person to the document containing its RDF description and allows RDF browsers to distinguish this main resource from other auxiliary resources that just happen to be mentioned in the document. We use rdfs:isDefinedBy instead of its weaker superproperty rdfs:seeAlso because the content at /data/alice is authoritative. The remaining statements are the actual white pages data.
The HTML document at http://www.example.com/people/alice should contain in its header a <link /> element that points to the corresponding RDF document:
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Alice's Homepage</title>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rdf+xml"
title="RDF Version"
href="http://www.example.com/data/alice" />
</head> ...
This allows RDF-aware Web clients to discover the RDF information. The approach is recommended in the RDF/XML specification ([RDFXML], section 9). If the information on the Web page differs significantly from the RDF version, then we recommend using rel="meta" instead of rel="alternate".
The following illustration shows how the RDF and HTML documents should relate the three URIs to each other:
The W3C's Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group has published a document that describes how to implement the solutions presented here on the Apache Web server. The Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies [Recipes] mostly discuss the publication of RDF vocabularies, but the ideas can also be applied to other kinds of small RDF datasets that are published from static files.
Not all projects that work with Semantic Web technologies make their data available on the Web. But a growing number of projects follow the practices described here. This section gives a few examples.
ECS Southampton. The School of Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton has a Semantic Web site that employs the 303 solution and is a great example of Semantic Web engineering. It is documented in the ECS URI System Specification [ECS]. Separate subdomains are used for HTML documents, RDF documents, and resource identifiers. Take these examples:
Entering the first URI into a normal Web browser redirects to an HTML page about Wendy Hall. It presents a Web view of all available data on her. The page also links to her URI and to her RDF document.
D2R Server is an open-source application that can be used to publish data from relational databases on the Semantic Web in accordance with these guidelines. It employs the 303 solution and content negotiation. For example, the D2R Server publishing the DBLP Bibliography Database publishes several 100k bibliographical records and information about their authors. Example URIs, again connected via 303 redirects:
The RDF document for Chris Bizer is a SPARQL query result from the server's SPARQL endpoint:
http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/sparql?query= DESCRIBE+\%3Chttp\%3A\%2F\%2Fwww4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de \%2Fdblp\%2Fresource\%2Fperson\%2F315759\%3E
The SPARQL query encoded in this URI is:
DESCRIBE <http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/dblp/resource/person/315759>
This shows how a SPARQL endpoint can be used as a convenient method of serving resource descriptions.
Semantic MediaWiki is an open-source Semantic Wiki engine. Authors can use special wiki syntax to put semantic attributes and relationships into wiki articles. For each article, the software generates a 303 URI that identifies the article's topic, and serves RDF descriptions generated from the attributes and relationships. Semantic MediaWiki drives the OntoWorld wiki. It has an article about the city of Karlsruhe:
The URI of the RDF description is less than ideal, because it exposes the implementation (php) and refers redundantly to RDF in the path and in the query. A better URI would be for example http://ontoworld.org/rdf/Karlsruhe.
Many other approaches have been suggested over the years. While most of them are appropriate in special circumstances, we feel that they do not fit the criteria from Section 3, which are to be on the Web and don't be ambiguous. Therefore they are not adequate as general solutions for building a standards-based, non-fragmented, decentralized Semantic Web. We will discuss two of these approaches in some detail.
HTTP URIs already identify Web resources and Web documents, not other kinds of resources. Shouldn't we create a new URI scheme to identify other resources? Then we could easily distinguish them from Web documents just by looking at the first characters of the URI. For example, the info scheme can be used to identify books based on a LCCN number: info:lccn/2002022641.
Here are examples of such new URI schemes. A longer list is provided by Thompson and Orchard in URNs, Namespaces and Registries [TAG-URNs].
info:lccn/2002022641) and the Dewey decimal system
(info:ddc/22/eng//004.678).tag:hawke.org,2001-06-05:Taiko.@Jones.and.Company/(+phone.number) or
xri://northgate.library.example.com/(urn:isbn:0-395-36341-1).To be truly useful, a new scheme must also define a protocol how to access more information about the identified resource. For example, the ftp:// URI scheme identifies resourcse (files on an FTP server), and also comes with a protocol for accessing them (the FTP protocol).
Some of the new URI schemes provide no such protocol at all. Others provide a Web service that allows retrieval of descriptions using the HTTP protocol. The identifier is passed to the service, which looks up the information in a central database or in a federated way. The problem here is that a failure in this service renders the system unusable.
Another drawback can be a dependence on a standardization body. To register new parts in the info: space, a standardization body has to be contacted. This, or paying a license fee before creating a new URI, slows down adoption. In cases a standardization body is desirable to ensure that all URIs are unique (e.g. with ISBNs). But this can be achieved using HTTP URIs inside an HTTP namespace owned and managed by the standardization organization.
The problems with new URI schemes are discussed at length in URNs, Namespaces and Registries.
This approach radically solves the URI problem by doing away with URIs altogether: Instead of naming resources with a URI, anonymous nodes are used, and are described with information that allows us to find the right one. A person, for example, could be described with her name, date of birth, and social security number. These pieces of information should be sufficient to uniquely identify a person.
A popular practice is the use of a person's email address as a uniquely identifying piece of information. The foaf:mbox property is used in Friend of a Friend (FOAF) profiles for this purpose. In OWL, this kind of property is known as an Inverse Functional Property (IFP). When an agent encounters two resources with the same email address, it can infer that both refer to the same person and can treat them as one.
But how to be on the Web with this approach? How to enable agents to download more data about resources we mention? There is a best practice to achieve this goal: Provide not only the IFP of the resource (e.g. the person's email address), but also an rdfs:seeAlso property that points to a Web address of an RDF document with further information about it. We see that HTTP URIs are still used to identify the location where to download more information.
Furthermore, we now need several pieces of information to refer to a resource, the IFP value and the RDF document location. The simple act of linking by using a URI has become a process involving several moving parts, and this increases the risk of broken links and makes implementation more cumbersome.
Regarding FOAF's practice of avoiding URIs for people, we agree with Tim Berners-Lee's advice: “Go ahead and give yourself a URI. You deserve it!”
Resource names on the Semantic Web should fulfill two requirements: First, a description of the identified resource should be retrievable with standard Web technologies. Second, a naming scheme should not confuse documents and the things described by the documents.
We have described two approaches that fulfill these requirements, both based on the HTTP URI scheme and protocol. One is to use the 303 HTTP status code to redirect from the resource identifier to the describing document. One is to use “hash URIs” to identify resources, exploiting the fact that hash URIs are retrieved by dropping the part after the hash and retrieving the other part.
The requirement to distinguish between resources and their descriptions increases the need for coordination between multiple URIs. Some useful techniques are: embedding links to RDF data in HTML documents, using RDF statements to describe the relationship between the URIs, and using content negotiation to redirect to an appropriate description of a resource.
Many thanks to Tim Berners-Lee who helped us understanding the TAG solution by answering chat requests and contributing e-mails with clarifications. Special thanks go to Stuart Williams (HP Labs) and Norman Walsh from TAG, who reviewed this document and provided essential feedback in June 2007 and September 2007 about many formulations that were (accidentially) contrary to the TAG's view. Also special thanks to the Semantic Web Deployment Group's members Michael Hausenblas, Vit Novacek, and Ed Summers' reviews and their review summary sent in October 2007. We wish to thank everyone else who has reviewed drafts of this document, especially Chris Bizer and Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes.
This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (bmb+f), (Grants 01 IW C01, Project EPOS: Evolving Personal to Organizational Memories; and 01 AK 702B, Project InterVal: Internet and Value Chains) and by the European Union IST fund (Grant FP6-027705, Project Nepomuk).
Non-addressed issues and general handling of issues
The editors collected all recognized feedback in a SVN folder, with more notes on the editing status.
Some issues found by reviewers were intentionally not addressed by the editors. They are marked with red-colored backgrounds in these documents:
TODO
@@ pubrules were checked on 12.12.2007 by Leo Sauermann, repeated checking is good once the document is on the /TR location.
@@ TAG suggested a replacement for the first graphic in their review. Not done yet (12.12.2007)
@@ issue of using the terms "non-informationresource", "information resource" or "web document".
Leo Sauermann: The term "web document" is not common in W3Cs standardization language.
Nevertheless it is understandable by the target audience, web developers.
Tim Berners lee indicated positive feedback (link needed) towards the term "web document",
both the SWD and TAG are critisising "web document" and required better explanations or dropping the term. As this is W3C note, we
should think about dropping the term "web document".
Richard Cyganiak, Thu, 29 Nov 2007: I'm strongly opposed to changing
this terminology. "Non-information resource" is possibly the most
unfortunate term ever used in discussions of web architecture, and we should
quickly forget that it ever existed. ... Information
resource" is an official engineering term, but inappropriate for an
introductory document. The terms we currently use, "thing"/"other resource"
and "web document" are appropriate, sufficiently well-explained and correct.
The terminology has support from key TAG members, including Tim Berners Lee. I don't
think that anything needs to be changed with regard to these terms.
@@ Reviewers asked for example rules of thumb how to distinguish between document identifiers and concept identifiers (information and non-information resources). Write some wget examples that do that? Leo Sauermann agrees that we did not cover the crucial point yet: what is the definitive test to verify that a URI identifies a non-information resource? Range-14 says: "If an "http" resource responds to a GET request with a 303 (See Other) response, then the resource identified by that URI could be any resource;" Or is this such a problem at all? At the end the RDF:type indicates the nature of a resource. If we find a script example, I would put that into the 4.6. implementation section.
@@ Danny Ayers: style - Abstract and much of the content uses 1st person plural "we..." - is that ok? Leo Sauermann: Its typical for scientists (the authors) to use this wording, and acceptable outside scientific publications.
@@ Danny Ayers: style - Web/web, web site/website - consistency needed
@@ Danny Ayers: Status will probably need editing for W3C-conformance
@@ Danny Ayers: "follow-your-nose" might be a useful phrase to include somewhere