RE: Uncool Gov URI's

Gannon,

 Excellent point. URL shortening is poor substitute for using Cool URIs ( http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/ ) and systems that preserve URLs. And many of the shorteners use odd country domains--I doubt many of the URLs that use ".ly" such as bit.ly have anything to do with Libya. 

I hope that governments start to enforce the use of permanent and server technology neutral URLs that are simply and predictably constructed. And then the governments could always publish on their own servers with all links full and clear. Only then through syndication should the material be allowed to be changed by other systems out of control of the government. This way there will always be the original document at a permanent URL and that anyone can always cite using that URL the authentic information. 

Eventually, Twitter and other systems that encourage URL shortening can show that the abbreviating of URIs is not needed. This is as simple as transforming the link into a a href pair, with the full URI in the href and a visible shortened version.

Daniel Bennett
CTO, eCitizen Foundation
daniel@citizencontact.com



-----Original Message-----
From: "Gannon Dick" <gannon_dick@yahoo.com>
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 1:45pm
To: "W3C eGov Interest Group (All)" <public-egov-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Uncool Gov URI's

A recent contest involving Google's Chrome OS featured a contest which involved recognition of the "Google URL Shortener" at http://goo.gl/

The "only" problems are that this convention conflicts with both the IANA Root Zone [1] and ISO 3166-1 [2].

This highlights the problem of "hand offs" between Central Governments and Local Governments.  In this case, the Kingdom of Denmark (an EU Member), has lost a measure of control of a subdivision (Greenland) in Cyberspace.

--Gannon

[1] http://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/gl.html
[2] http://www.iso.org/iso/iso-3166-1_decoding_table

Received on Monday, 13 December 2010 19:17:55 UTC