Re: Real URLs for real things

2008/5/15 Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>:
> [...] Another problem that was constantly recurring, he said, was due to the
> confusion between a page, and the thing it represented.
>
> And that set me thinking. Saying stuff about something that doesn't have a
> URL is hard, hard in RDFa, hard in RDF, and usually needs blanknodes, which
> our grandmothers are never going to understand.
>
> So, does anyone feel that they have enough energy for us to propose a new
> type of URL, the primary topic of:
>
>        pto:http://www.w3.org/ is the W3C
>        pto:http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee is Tim BL
>        pto:mailto:timbl@w3.org is also Tim BL
>        pto:http://rdfa.info/ is RDFa
>
> and so on. You would never be expected to dereference such a URL, and you
> can see that you are talking about a meta subject by inspection, and you can
> automatically derive:
>
>        <pto:http://www.w3.org/> foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf <http:www.w3.org/>
>
> It seems to me that it would be far easier to use than all that "#me" stuff
> and all those 303 replies you have to organise to do it right (or is it
> 302?).

Why not use XRI's cross-context identification [1], to point to
http://www.w3.org/ in a context of in which means
foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf, something roughly like

xri://(http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/isPrimaryTopicOf)/(http://www.w3.org/)

[1] http://dev.inames.net/wiki/Why_XRI#.231:_Cross-Context_Identification

I know how wrong this could be, but anyway ...

-- 
Laurian Gridinoc, purl.org/net/laur