Obviously there's a certain amount of distribution natural in the universe. Knowledge is created in some places and consumed in others, etc. You're thinking that the Semantic Web presumes that processing will only be done at the consumer end? Of course the producer may publish processed views.

You want the consumer to be able to ask the producer to process it in custom ways? That involves downloading code, right? Arguably, the best SemWeb approach to code is Horn rules, which fit naturally into query languages -- so a consumer could ask a producer for the answer to some query, where the query involves arbitrary processing. Does that give you what you want? I'm cool with that, although it seems like no one really want to run anyone else's code.

Of course RDF Query work is still in early stages; right now almost everyone just fetches an RDF/XML file, however big it is. That is a rather bandwidth-rich approach, of course. Some query designs do allow rules, however, so if the policies allow it, the client can ask the server to pre-process the data to make it smaller.

sandro@w3.org