The PII Namespace

Site searches normally require a "bit bucket" of sorts when search results have some cyber-stalking overtones.  From a Commercial Perspective most Social Networking sites and Search Engines can push an extra page of ads, so the trouble of rewriting this page functionality is perhaps worthwhile.

For Government and non-profit NGO's the situation is different.  There is no potential benefit to a sticky domain.  Rather than go to the trouble of explaining that the query is out of line, users can be sent to the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) namespace.

http://purl.org/pii/terms/  There are 15 terms/URL's, for the fastidious, but any one of them will make the point that the requested information is unavailable.  In addition, a 16th, http://purl.org/pii/terms/misc should be reserved for exactly the opposite message - that the referring page contains no PII.  That may be an adoptable standard, maybe not.  It might be handy for reinforcement of a stated privacy policy.  This is not so much about creating Standards as it is saving time and trouble on Requirements Documentation, which is to say I'll let Chris Beer handle the Internationalization :o)

--Gannon

Received on Monday, 7 March 2011 00:28:48 UTC