Re: Skolemization .well-known prefix: genid --> bnode or blanknode

On Jul 18, 2012, at 11:01 AM, David Booth wrote:

> Hi Richard,
> 
> On Wed, 2012-07-18 at 10:13 +0100, Richard Cyganiak wrote:
>> David,
>> 
>> On 16 Jul 2012, at 03:52, David Booth wrote:
> [ . . . ]
>>> I suggest changing "genid" to "bnode" or "blanknode".
>> 
>> There was a poll between the alternatives "bnode", "genid" and
>> "skolem" here:
>> http://www.w3.org/2011/rdf-wg/meeting/2011-05-25
>> 
>> "genid" won. IIRC the argument that carried the day against "bnode"
>> was: "It's not a bnode."
> 
> No, of course it isn't, it's a URI.  But it is *for* a bnode.  My
> website is called http://dbooth.org/ because it is *for* me, not because
> it *is* me.
> 
> Since the WG has already chosen the name "genid", the WG will have to
> decide whether this input constitutes sufficient grounds to reconsider
> the name.  But I really think the WG will be better helping the
> community by choosing a name that is more clearly suggestive of its
> purpose.  In debugging and validating sem web applications people
> routinely visually inspect the data, looking at what URIs are used and
> where they came from.  (There may well be other .well-known URIs that
> become widely used in the future, so the fact that a bnode URI is minted
> within .well-known will not necessarily be much of a visual clue.)
> "genid" is a totally generic name that is already used for many other
> purposes.  See for example, Microsoft's GenID object for generating
> globally unique identifiers:
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee796748%28v=cs.10%29.aspx 
> OTOH "bnode" or "blanknode" would not be generic, and would clearly
> correspond directly to established RDF terminology, just as my website
> name *corresponds* to the name of my person and helps people to
> instantly recognize that it is a website *for* me.  

Well, I wasn't a WG member when this was decided, but I did see it go by. IMO, the term "gemid" means nothing. To me, it says just "generated identifier", and nothing that would indicate that it denotes an unnamed resource (or existential identifier). My preference would be for something more like http://example.com/.well-known/anonid/d26a2d0e98334696f4ad70a677abc1f6, which provides a better linguistic clue as to what the IRI is intended to represent.

Gregg

> P.S. A tongue-in-cheek suggestion: the-uri-formerly-known-as-a-bnode  ;)
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -- 
> David Booth, Ph.D.
> http://dbooth.org/
> 
> Opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily
> reflect those of his employer.
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 19 July 2012 02:06:08 UTC