RE: URIs for Concept & ConceptScheme - best practice?

Simon

 

Anyone who is in the UK at the mo and is in the business of managing
identifiers for resources within government departments might possibly be
ruminating on why uri's don't actually always make good identifiers.  

 

For info.

 

http://www.education.gov.uk

 

versus

 

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk

 

 

Proper separation between identification and resolution  anyone (Ducks
behind the parapet J)

 

 

Cheers

 

Rob

 

 

 

From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org [mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Simon Cox
Sent: 14 May 2010 13:42
To: public-esw-thes@w3.org
Subject: URIs for Concept & ConceptScheme - best practice?

 

I'm thinking about identifier policies for ontologies and concept-schemes. 

 

In work that I have done previously on identifier policies for Open
Geospatial Consortium and for Commission for Geoscience Information we used
the identifier scheme largely as a way to enforce certain governance
arrangements for resource publication. The general principle is that a URI
is composed of a number of fields. A new URI can only be minted if the
values in all the fields are valid; the allowable value for each field must
come from a specific register; and different parties are authorized to
modify different registers. So we end up with a delegation system. This kind
of scheme uses the URI structure for internal governance purposes, within
the community. 

 

But http URIs have a 'path-like' structure which can be interpreted as a
tree. Read in this way, the URI scheme impies certain relationships between
resources, in particular 'ownership' of children by their parents.
Notwithstanding the REST principle that information is in the representation
and not the identifier, Cool URIs can be interpreted by users, and typically
support navigation through tweaking the URI (many refs).  This kind of
scheme is aimed at external users. 

 

Following this approach: is it smart to have the URI for a SKOS concept to
be just an extension of the URI for the SKOS concept scheme? 

 

e.g. 

<http://resource.geosciml.org/concept/unit-rank/bed> skos:inScheme
<http://resource.geosciml.org/concept/unit-rank>.

 

I'm assuming slash URIs, since I want the server to do most of the work,
supporting content-negotiation, etc. 

The advantage in this approach is that a casual user can navigate between
parent and child by URI twiddling. 

But possible gotchas are 

(1) it assumes exactly one parent 

   - it requires every concept to be in a scheme

   - it privileges one scheme above any others (though I think there is no
limit on the number of inScheme properties a Concept can have?)

(2) there must be some others

 

I'd be interested in comments. 

 

--------------------------------------------------------
Simon Cox

European Commission, Joint Research Centre 
Institute for Environment and Sustainability 
Spatial Data Infrastructures Unit, TP 262 
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