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eXtensible Resource Management
eXtensible Resource Management XRM
XRM is shorthand for the range of services that RDF/Ontological tools should offer. Using a combination of Application Server Scripting, SQL, XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF Schema, RSS, DAML+OIL, and OWL, they will syndicate, aggregate, and semantically and ontologically relate server, database, filesystem, and internet resources. This will encompass many previously disjoint operations including:
The simplest and most intuitive approach to authoring semantic content that occurs to me is to manage resources through a directory style view, as one does bookmarks or email. Rather than navigating solely by file system directories and files, however, the directories in this case would be things like RDF classes and properties and the files would be resources.
When a new resource is added, a url is entered as its unique identifier and a label (or labels, in multilingual mode, using xml:lang) is entered, as with bookmarks, for ease of human readability. (Later, when the manager is more advanced, RDF classes will be offered for use as templates for the new resource, and there will be an option to mark the new resource as a property.) Subsequently, statements may be made about the resource by adding properties to it. Known RDF properties (either general, such as the dublin core, or class specific, if the resource has a class) are offered by their labels (with full URL on mouseover) and sorted by namespace for selection, or a new one can be created. Once a property is selected, known resources are offered or a new resource or literal may be entered as its value. Thus a full statement can be entered into the manager.
The manager will offer three other features of primary interest:
Resource Negotiation
In his Design Issues document about Generic Resources, Tim Berners-Lee defines a "resource" thusly:
A "resource" is a conceptual entity (a little like a Platonic ideal). When represented electronically, a resource may be of the kind which corresponds to only one posisble bit stream representation. An example is the text version of an Internet RFC. That never changes. It will always have the same checksum.He goes on to give a suggestion about using RDF to model these relationships.On the other hand, a resource may be generic in that as a concept it is well specified but not so specifically specified that it can only be represented by a single bit stream. In this case, other URIs may exist which identify a resource more specifically. These other URIs identify resources too, and there is a relationship of genericity between the generic and the relatively specific resource.
The main trick in this area is generally called Content Negotiation.
A more advanced version of this has been proposed by rfc2295 Transparent Content Negotiation in HTTP and rfc2296 HTTP Remote Variant Selection Algorithm -- RVSA/1.0.
A skyLink (or new term) ought to be a new way of linking to a resource that checks for the real resource at the given url, returns it if available, returns a (well-identified) cached version if not.
A skyImage ought to be a new standard resource type that offers a link to variants by resolution, color space, and subject (other pictures of the same or similar things, for instance).
