How to suggest dereferenceability?

[RubenVerborgh]

How can a server suggest to a client that a certain resource can/should be dereferenced?

Mailing list thread

The goal is not to find out whether they are dereferenceable or not, but whether it is worth (from the publishers' point of view) to follow them.

[RubenVerborgh]

Solution 1: set the type of the resource to hydra:Resource

Example

<ResourceA> a hydra:Resource.

Advantages

• easy to express, it's just a type annotation

Disadvantages

• It might be incorrect to express this as a type, since dereferenceability is not an ontological concern.
• It is not possible to indicate that the server does not expect the client to reference something.
• Conflicts with the current definition of hydra:Resource. (See #90.)
• The party (which server) suggesting to deference is not explicitly mentioned.

[RubenVerborgh]

Solution 2: set the hydra:dereferenceable property

Example

<ResourceA> hydra:dereferenceable true.
<ResourceB> hydra:dereferenceable false.

Advantages

• easy to express, it's just a property
• possible to indicate whether the server does or does not suggest dereferencing

Disadvantages

• The party (which server) suggesting to deference is not explicitly mentioned.

[kjetilk]

Sorry, I didn't read the thread, but the old-school way of doing this is using rdfs:seeAlso. I don't know if that gives the precision you want though.

[jaw111]

@kjetilk wouldn't that require that every property used to refer to something that dereferences would need to the rdfs:subPropertyOf rdfs:seeAlso? Either that or materialize the rdfs:seeAlso statements in every response.

Furthermore I'm going to be a pedant (sorry).

1. What do we mean by "dereferenceable", that the server gives some HTTP response, or something more specific like a HTTP 200 OK? Assume we can agree to use this definition from the Linked Data Glossary.
2. Is being dereferenceable a characteristic (I hesitate to say "property" as that's a somewhat loaded term) of the URI or the resource that URI identifies? For example what if I extend the example above with statement <ResourceA> owl:sameAs <ResourceB> where one of the URIs dereferences and the other does not.

[RubenVerborgh]

@kjetilk / @jaw111 Thanks for the feedback, please remember to have the discussions on the mailing list. I've added your messages there.

[alien-mcl]

This seems to be out of scope of hydra. Also there was no other activity since 2015, so I believe it's OK to close it.