What does cooking have to do with registries? Quite a lot, as it turns out. In this first guest appearance, Tom Baker describes the “cookbook” drafted by Alistair Miles that enables Apache HTTP servers to provide different responses for serving RDFS/OWL vocabularies, depending on the nature of the requestor.

I’ve been bugging Tom for some time about becoming a blogger, but he was on his way to Bangkok and didn’t have time to sit down and figure it all out, so we agreed on a compromise (cut and paste from email).

From Tom:

Alistair Miles has drafted a “cookbook” on configuring Apache
HTTP Servers to provide multiple types of documentation
on RDFS/OWL vocabularies [1]. The cookbook presents
ten “recipes” for configuring an Apache Web server with
“conditional redirects” so that the URIs of a vocabulary and
its terms will resolve to different presentational views of
the vocabulary. A Web server configured according to one
of the recipes will serve readable Web pages to humans and
machine-processable RDF to applications. Different recipes
are required according to whether a vocabulary provider uses
URIs with hashes or URIs with slashes; prefers to redirect
to one Web document for the entire vocabulary or to separate
documents for each individual term; and whether the provider
redirects through a PURL.ORG server. The cookbook is currently
undergoing review in the Vocabulary Management Task Force of
the W3C Semantic Web Best Practices Working Group [2].

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/VM/http-examples/2005-11-18/
[2] http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/VM/