The Self-Describing Web

The following is a summary of the (draft) TAG finding regarding The Self-Describing Web in the context of our work and some preliminary conclusions (to be discussed).

Summary

• self-descriptive: in order to support ad-hoc exploration users must be able to get useful information from documents prepared by people whom they don't know, and with whom they have not coordinated in advance.
• baseline: Web standard retrieval algorithm
• how can new formats/encodings be deployed in a self-descriptive way?
  • use existing URI schemes, protocols, and media types wherever practical
  • Web representations should link to the information needed to support automatic processing of those representations
• Web of Data (RDF, RDFa, GRDDL, etc.): representations provided in RDF contribute to the self-describing Web

Conclusions

• our work should be aligned with the TAG finding 'The Self-Describing Web'
• wherever possible we should use HTTP URIs (see also linked data)
• we should use RDF-based descriptions for the automated interpretation (discovery, usage, etc.) of the spatio-temporal resources (see also POWDER, UMBEL, voiD, etc.)