Hi There. I’m blog hopping….

Cheers,
Mark Diggory
DSpace Systems Manager
MIT Libraries

Good point.

Speaking only for myself here(!), I completely agree that an XHTML/RDFa document would make a good representation of an ORE Resource Map; and that such a document could/would probably look very much like what we think of as a “splash page”.

Of course if you want to talk about both

(i) the Resource Map (with an XHTML/RDFa representation and possibly other representations via conneg) and
(ii) a “splash page”

as two distinct resources, which I guess we might want to do in some circumstances, then we need two distinct URIs for those two distinct resources.

But that’s still perfectly do-able. One could probably even serve the _same_ XHTML/RDFa doc as a representation of _both_ of those _distinct_ resources (pace taking care with base URIs etc).

I agree with you that things could be loosened. The Discovery document position tends to arise when it is assumed that it must be possible to tell the difference between a resource and an information resource, perhaps by performing an HTTP request. (This is something I know that Ian has argued in the past.)

In my view this is an over-literal reading of the situation, something various people have tried to tackle. My own comments are in Once more on information resources and RDFa. I also have an older post from a couple of years ago, which was originally intended to be a critical look at the whole discussion from the same standpoint as the Discovery document that you quote, but in the course of working it through I discovered that my own view was wrong. It may be of interest to others who are as confused as I was, and it’s called The Information Resource Debate, and RDFa.

Interesting work, though. And a great use of RDFa.

All the best,

Mark Birbeck
http://webBackplane.com/mark-birbeck