Re: National Identification Number URIs ( NIN URIs )

On 8 March 2010 11:33, Hugh Glaser <hg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> On 08/03/2010 01:15, "Kingsley Idehen" <kidehen@openlinksw.com> wrote:
>
>> Aldo Bucchi wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> All countries have a National Identification Number scheme ( NIN ).
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number
>>>
>>> Also, all countries have code points in different schemes.
>>>
>>> So, can't we combine both to create a de-facto URI for people based on
>>> country ids?
>>>
>>> For example: http://dbpedia.org/nin/cl/14168212
>>> That would be me based on my Chilean NIN.
>>>
>>> Is there some namespace for this already?
>>>
>> Don't use DBpedia namespace in this manner.
>>
>> Why not encourage people to do this:
>>
>> urn:country.person.id.{national-id}
> Although superficially a nice idea, for me the answer to your question would
> be that it would not longer be Linked Data.
> Design Issue Number 2 (http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html) says:
> "Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names."
> I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.
> doi, urn suck.
> It is hard to work out what they mean (resolve), and even if I can it is not
> a distributed (web) system.
>
> But I do agree that subverting dbpedia for this would not be a good thing to
> do.
>
> Maybe okkam or another project/company wants to step into the gap?

Whichever organisation decides to take up the gap they will want to
have a good team of international law experts, specifically in the
privacy area. There are some pretty strict laws in place about what
people can do with national identifiers in some countries that aren't
as trivial as creating a Linked Data URI and linking it up to any and
all available datasources. Perhaps it would be better to focus on
single nations in order to understand what the privacy impacts are.

Cheers,

Peter

Received on Monday, 8 March 2010 01:44:01 UTC