Matthew Cockerill wrote:
> If I have came across 2 URIs:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=0393060349
> and also:
> http://isbn.org/madeupresolver?039-3-06034-9
>
> Using those alternatives, how would I as an application developer know that they were
> corresponded to the same entity?
Again, remaining firmly on the fence (and with apologies to Tony and his
blood pressure...) but I think there are pragmatic answers to this:
Dereference them. One may redirect to the other, indicating that its an
alias for the other resource.
Use the Accept: header to request RDF/XML describing the resource(s) so
that one can look for owl:sameAs assertions or other properties from
which one can infer equality.
But granted, thats in a world where everyone adopts RDF. Outside of
that I have to resort to out-of-band information.
As a counter question. Given an info URI how do I discover how I can
resolve it? Or, how do I find metadata that tells me that two info: URIs
refer to the same resource (e.g. info:pmid and info:doi ids for the same
article?) Looks like I have to jump straight to out-of-band means?
What I like about reliance on http: URIs is that they're dereferencable
so I a chance at answering the above question either via the
semantics of the HTTP protocol or those of a Representation that I
understand (e.g. RDF/XML). If there's a way to do that for other schemes
then great.
L.
Received on Tue Nov 15 2005 - 11:32:13 EST