Re: Minting URIs: how to deal with unknown data structures

Frans,

Great to hear that you're interested in applying Linked Data and to  
promote it in the Netherlands - certainly a very active area ;)

> I would welcome any advice on this topic from people who have had  
> some more experience with publishing Linked Data.

I find [1] a very useful page from a pragmatic perspective. If you're  
more into books and not only focusing on the data side (see 'REST and  
Linked Data: a match made for domain driven development?' [2] for more  
details on data vs. API), I can also recommend [3], which offers some  
more practical guidance in terms of URI space management.

Cheers,
	Michael

[1] http://data.gov.uk/resources/uris
[2] http://ws-rest.org/2011/proc/a5-page.pdf
[3] http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260
--
Dr. Michael Hausenblas, Research Fellow
LiDRC - Linked Data Research Centre
DERI - Digital Enterprise Research Institute
NUIG - National University of Ireland, Galway
Ireland, Europe
Tel. +353 91 495730
http://linkeddata.deri.ie/
http://sw-app.org/about.html

On 15 Apr 2011, at 13:48, Frans Knibbe wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Some newbie questions here...
>
> I have recently come in contact with the concept of Linked Data and  
> I have become enthusiastic. I would like to promote the idea within  
> my company (we specialize is geographical data) and within my  
> country. I have read the excellent Linked Data book (“Linked Data:  
> Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space”) and I think I am almost  
> ready to start publishing Linked Data. I understand that it is  
> important to get the URIs right, and not have to change them later.  
> That is what my questions are about.
>
> I have acquired the first part (authority) of my URIs, let's say it  
> is lod.mycompany.com. Now I am faced with the question: How do I  
> come up with a URI scheme that will stand the test of time? I think  
> I will start with publishing some FOAF data of myself and co- 
> workers. And then hopefully more and more data will follow. At this  
> moment I can not possible imagine which types of data we will  
> publish. They are likely to have some kind of geographical  
> component, but that is true for a lot of data. I believe it is not  
> possible to come up with any hierarchical structure that will  
> accommodate all types of data that might ever be published.
>
> So I think it is best to leave out any indication of data  
> organization in the path element of the URI (i.e. http://lod.mycompany.com/people 
>  is a bad idea). In my understanding, I could use base URIs like http://lod.mycompany.com/resource 
> , http://lod.mycompany.com/page and hhtp://lod.mycompany.com.data,  
> and then use unique identifiers for all the things I want to publish  
> something about. If I understand correctly, I don't need the URI to  
> describe the hierarchy of my data because all Linked Data are self- 
> describing. Nice.
>
> But then I am faced with the problem: What method do I use to mint  
> my identifiers? Those identifiers need to be unique. Should I use a  
> number sequence, or a hash function? In those cases the URIs would  
> be uniform and give no indication of the type of data. But a number  
> sequence seems unsafe, and in the case of a hash function I would  
> still need to make some kind of structured choice of input values.
>
> I would welcome any advice on this topic from people who have had  
> some more experience with publishing Linked Data.
>
> Regards,
> Frans Knibbe
>
>
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 15 April 2011 17:57:58 UTC