Re: Datatypes with no (cool) URI

So David's solution (using PURLs) provides a bit of transparency and
manageablity, but it has the disadvantage of having no official
status.

Maybe (probably) I'm missing something here?

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 11:19 AM, David Booth <david@dbooth.org> wrote:
> Okay, then maybe a PURL would help?  purl.org now supports "partial
> redirects":
> http://purl.org/docs/faq.html#toc1.9
> That may not quite work with your ISO URIs though.
>
> Personally, I don't think you should worry too much about a machine
> expecting to be able to dereference the datatype URI to get data back.
> I would expect most datatype URIs would lead to human-oriented
> information, though that could gradually change.
>
> David
>
>
> On Tue, 2012-04-03 at 15:58 +0100, 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?
>> >
>> >
>>
>
> --
> David Booth, Ph.D.
> http://dbooth.org/
>
> Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
> reflect those of his employer.
>
>



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John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
Director, Web Science Operations
Tetherless World Constellation (RPI)
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Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2012 15:27:23 UTC