editorial changes: improve note on relative IRIs; add text to clarify that dereferencing is orthogonal to RDF Concepts
authorRichard Cyganiak <richard@cyganiak.de>
Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:55:56 +0000
changeset 527 18ecdb539bda
parent 526 8610b8f58685
child 528 94b44c1234ab
editorial changes: improve note on relative IRIs; add text to clarify that dereferencing is orthogonal to RDF Concepts
rdf-concepts/index.html
--- a/rdf-concepts/index.html	Tue Oct 30 07:05:51 2012 -0700
+++ b/rdf-concepts/index.html	Tue Nov 06 10:55:56 2012 +0000
@@ -254,14 +254,13 @@
     <a title="RDF statement">RDF statements</a>.</li>
     </ul>
 
-    <p class="issue">This should explain better that IRIs in RDF play
-    two roles—as globally unique identifiers in a graph data model that
-    describes resources, and as
-    starting points for RESTful interaction with these resources
-    (like elsewhere in the Web).
-    This specification is only concerned with the first aspect.
-    Alignment between the two aspects is generally important, but out 
-    of scope for this spec.</p>
+    <p>Perhaps the most important characterisitic of <a title="IRI">IRIs</a>
+    in web architecture is that they can be 
+    <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/#uri-dereference">dereferenced</a>,
+    and hence serve as starting points for interactions with a remote server.
+    This specification, however, is not concerned with such interactions.
+    It does not define an interaction model. It only treats IRIs as globally
+    unique identifiers in a graph data model that describes resources.</p>
 </section>
 
 <section id="vocabularies">
@@ -275,9 +274,6 @@
     RDF vocabularies. Some such vocabularies are mentioned in the
     Primer [[RDF-PRIMER]].</p>
 
-    <p class="issue">The material below may be moved to the new
-    <em>RDF 1.1 Primer</em> document once it becomes available.</p>
-
     <p>The <a title="IRI">IRIs</a> in an <a>RDF vocabulary</a> often share
     a common substring known as a <dfn>namespace IRI</dfn>.
     Some namespace IRIs are associated by convention with a short name
@@ -318,11 +314,6 @@
     is presumed or demonstrated then the truth of <em>B</em> can be inferred.
     An account of meaning and entailment in RDF, using the formalism of
     model theory, is given in [[RDF-MT]].</p>
-
-    <p class="issue">The Working Group is considering removing the
-    <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-mt/#rules">informative entailment rules</a>
-    from the <em>RDF Semantics</em> document, and moving them to another
-    document. Moving them to this document is one possibility.</p>
 </section>
 
 
@@ -338,6 +329,9 @@
     <a>RDF graph</a> in a <dfn>concrete RDF syntax</dfn>, such as
     Turtle [[TURTLE-TR]], RDFa [[RDFA-PRIMER]], RDF/XML [[RDF-SYNTAX-GRAMMAR]],
     or N-Triples [[N-TRIPLES]].</p>
+
+    <p class="issue">Can the difference between data model and
+    serialization be hammered home more clearly?</p>
 </section>
 
 
@@ -429,9 +423,9 @@
     <p>An <dfn title="IRI"><acronym title="Internationalized Resource Identifier">IRI</acronym></dfn>
     (Internationalized Resource Identifier) within an RDF graph
     is a Unicode string [[!UNICODE]] that conforms to the syntax
-    defined in RFC 3987 [[!IRI]]. IRIs are a generalization of
+    defined in RFC 3987 [[!RFC3987]]. IRIs are a generalization of
     <dfn title="URI"><acronym title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</acronym>s</dfn>
-    [[URI]]. Every absolute URI and URL is an IRI.</p>
+    [[RFC3986]]. Every absolute URI and URL is an IRI.</p>
 
     <p>IRIs in the RDF abstract syntax MUST be absolute, and MAY
     contain a fragment identifier.</p>
@@ -440,21 +434,28 @@
     Two IRIs are equal if and only if they are equivalent
     under Simple String Comparison according to
     <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3987#section-5.1">section 5.1</a>
-    of [[!IRI]]. Further normalization MUST NOT be performed when
+    of [[!RFC3987]]. Further normalization MUST NOT be performed when
     comparing IRIs for equality.</p>
 
     <p class="note">When IRIs are used in operations that are only
     defined for URIs, they must first be converted according to
     the mapping defined in
     <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3987#section-3.1">section 3.1</a>
-    of [[!IRI]]. A notable example is retrieval over the HTTP
+    of [[!RFC3987]]. A notable example is retrieval over the HTTP
     protocol. The mapping involves UTF-8 encoding of non-ASCII
     characters, %-encoding of octets not allowed in URIs, and
     Punycode-encoding of domain names.</p>
 
-    <p class="note">Some concrete syntaxes permit relative IRIs
-    as a shorthand for absolute IRIs, and define how to resolve
-    the relative IRIs against a base IRI.</p>
+    <p class="note">Some
+    <a title="concrete RDF syntax">concrete RDF syntaxes</a> permit
+    <dfn title="relative IRI">relative IRIs</dfn> as a convenient shorthand
+    that allows authoring of documents independently from their final
+    publishing location. Relative IRIs must be
+    <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-5.2">resolved
+    against</a> a <dfn>base IRI</dfn> to make them absolute.
+    Therefore, the RDF graph serialized in such syntaxes is well-defined only
+    if a <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-5.1">base IRI
+    can be established</a> [[RFC3986]].</p>
 
     <p class="note">Previous versions of RDF used the term
     “<dfn>RDF URI Reference</dfn>” instead of “IRI” and allowed
@@ -466,13 +467,13 @@
     ‘<code>“</code>’ (double quote), and “<code> </code>” (space).
     In IRIs, these characters must be percent-encoded as
     described in <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-2.1">section 2.1</a>
-    of [[URI]].</p>
+    of [[RFC3986]].</p>
 
     <div class="note" id="note-iri-interop">
       <p>Interoperability problems can be avoided by minting
       only IRIs that are normalized according to
       <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3987#section-5">Section 5</a>
-      of [[!IRI]]. Non-normalized forms that should be avoided
+      of [[!RFC3987]]. Non-normalized forms that should be avoided
       include:</p>
 
       <ul>
@@ -627,7 +628,7 @@
 
     <p>In situations where stronger identification is needed, systems MAY
     systematically transform some or all of the blank nodes in an RDF graph
-    into IRIs [[!IRI]].  Systems wishing to do this SHOULD mint a new, globally
+    into IRIs [[!RFC3987]].  Systems wishing to do this SHOULD mint a new, globally
     unique IRI (a <dfn>Skolem IRI</dfn>) for each blank node so transformed.</p>
 
     <p>This transformation does not change the meaning of an RDF graph,
@@ -654,7 +655,7 @@
 
     <p class="note">RFC 5785 [[WELL-KNOWN]] only specifies well-known URIs,
     not IRIs. For the purpose of this document, a well-known IRI is any
-    IRI that results in a well-known URI after IRI-to-URI mapping [[!IRI]].</p>
+    IRI that results in a well-known URI after IRI-to-URI mapping [[!RFC3987]].</p>
 </section>
 
 </section>
@@ -1143,7 +1144,7 @@
     <dfn>fragment identifiers</dfn>, as resource identifiers.
     The semantics of fragment identifiers are
     <a href="http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986#section-3.5">defined in
-    RFC 3986</a> [[URI]]: They identify a secondary resource
+    RFC 3986</a> [[RFC3986]]: They identify a secondary resource
     that is usually a part of, view of, defined in, or described in
     the primary resource, and the precise semantics depend on the set
     of representations that might result from a retrieval action
@@ -1190,9 +1191,6 @@
 <section id="section-Acknowledgments" class="informative">
     <h2>Acknowledgments</h2>
 
-    <p class="issue">This section <em>may</em> not yet acknowledge
-    <em>all</em> contributions to the RDF 1.1 version.</p>
-
     <p>The RDF 1.1 editors acknowledge valuable contributions from
     Thomas Baker, Dan Brickley, Gavin Carothers, Jeremy Carroll,
     John Cowan, Martin J. Dürst, Alex Hall, Steve Harris, Pat Hayes,
@@ -1229,6 +1227,8 @@
   <em>RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax</em>.</p>
 
   <ul>
+    <li>2012-11-06: Modify the <a title="relative IRI">Note on relative IRIs</a> to stress their usefulness and to clarify the role of RFC 3986 in the resolution process</li>
+    <li>2012-11-06: Informatively <a href="#referents">explain</a> that IRIs in this spec are treated only as nodes in a graph data model, and no interaction model is implied</li>
     <li>2012-08-09: Clarify that all datatypes are optional, but RDF-conformant specifications MAY require specific <a title="datatype map">datatype maps</a></li>
   </ul>
 </section>