Re: Datatypes with no (cool) URI

The ideal thing would be if ISO, Eurostat produced concise resolvable URIs of course. But while we wait for them to do that, why doesn't W3C mint and support URIs for the most commonly used code lists, that resolve to relevant documentation and/or links to the definitive documents from ISO etc.

Cheers

Bill


On 3 Apr 2012, at 15:58, Phil Archer wrote:

> Hi David,
> 
> Yes, one could use URL shorteners and that's probably the only sane way to go but it's still not ideal because:
> 
> 1. Both Bitly and Tinyurl come with "no guarantee of service" (and  a lot of tracking) - Google's goo.gl is all wrapped up with their services too - not the kind of thing public administrations will be happy about using. Yves Lafon's http://kwz.me is a pure shortener with no tracking of any kind but it's a one man project so, again, it won't be 'good enough' for public sector data.
> 
> 2. Neither a shortened URL nor the long form tell a human reader a lot whereas something (non-standard I know) like urn:iso/iec:5218:2004 tells you that it's an ISO standard that a human can look up. The ISO catalogue URLs point to Web pages or PDFs available from those Web pages so you still need to be a human to get the information. The danger would be that a machine would look up the datatype URI and expect to get data back, not ISO's paywall :-)
> 
> So, not ideal, but still the best (practical) solution?
> 
> 
> 
> On 03/04/2012 15:38, David Booth wrote:
>> On Tue, 2012-04-03 at 14:33 +0100, Phil Archer wrote:
>>> [ . . . ] The actual URI for it is
>>> http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36266
>>> (or rather, that's the page about the spec but that's a side issue for
>>> now).
>>> 
>>> That URI is just horrible and certainly not a 'cool URI'. The Eurostat
>>> one is no better.
>>> 
>>> Does the datatype URI have to resolve to anything (in theory no, but in
>>> practice? Would a URN be appropriate?
>> 
>> It's helpful to be able to click on the URI to figure out what exactly
>> was meant.  How about just using a URI shortener, such as tinyurl.com or
>> bit.ly?
>> 
>> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> Phil Archer
> W3C eGovernment
> http://www.w3.org/egov/
> 
> http://philarcher.org
> +44 (0)7887 767755
> @philarcher1
>

Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2012 15:11:10 UTC