14.3. Natures

The nature of a related resource says what the resource is. For example, the nature of a web page might be HTML, and the nature of an image might be JPEG. The nature is indicated by a URL. Normally this nature URL is a namespace URL for XML applications and a MIME media type URL for everything else. For instance, the XSLT nature is written as http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform. The JPEG nature is written as http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/jpeg.

The RDDL specification specifies two dozen natures that can be used in xlink:role attributes. In addition, you are welcome to define your own, but when possible, you should use the standard natures so that automated software can understand your documents and locate the related resources it needs to locate. These are the standard natures and their URLs:

Many other natures can be reasonably derived by following these examples. For instance, a PNG image could be given the nature because http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/image/png because PNG documents have the MIME media type image/png. Software written in Ruby could be given the nature http://www.rddl.org/natures/software#ruby. An RDF document can have the nature http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# taken from its namespace, and so forth.

14.2. RDDL Syntax		14.4. Purposes

Copyright © 2002 O'Reilly & Associates. All rights reserved.