Web Things, by Mark Baker

I’ve talked about my nose for self-description problems before in the context of RDF and media types. Now, with the publication of -04 of the RDF/XML media type registration draft, there’s another one.

Comment submitted.

The best summation of the issue, as I wrote in the ensuing thread is probably;

If somebody on the Web can’t distinguish between an RDF message which says “Mark hates bananas” versus one that says “Mark hates bananas (but not really)” (aka unasserted), then there is a failure to communicate. The “but not really” part must be part of the message. It can either be done through mechanisms in the RDF specs themselves (e.g. parseType=”literal”), or it can be done in an encapsulating spec or registry, such as the media type registration.