Re: A URI for your Favourite Pub: httpRange-14 Question

I think the amount of work and technical knowledge required by the
solution you choose makes rightfully one wonder how can it be really the
right thing to do (if the SW is to go to the masses).

personally.. I am totally for this solution,
http://larry.masinter.net/duri.html#tdb

urn:tdb:<date>:<encoded-URI>

I see some beautiful things:

First its not HTTP! so it satistifes my #1 rule for being a potentially usable conceptual identifier. 
(as i vocally expressed at the last identification workshop at www2006 ;-) lo all!)
nothing to maintain (URL in general do not live and in any reasonable scale),
no maintainer, so no cost, nothing to go "down" or "up".. no politics/jelousy/respect/worship 
 over the maintainer  etc..

Second, since its not an http but its something different, it can be given a clear semantics. Semantics of http is 
get the document at. Semantics of tbd: is "we're referring with a URI to the things that in that date was available at"
so .. since its given in the semantics that second part is a URI then one is free to dereference the second part and fall back 
into the usual scenario.. but with no ambiguity. 

Third, its extremely likely that others will automatically reuse that URI. 
One can argue if this is fundamental component of the SW or not. I think it might be, but nobody can deny the 
immense usefullness of this feature.

Forth, you're not minting into any other's namespace. Not that i am sure that is necessarely a bad 
thing becouse nobody can enforce this on the SW since there is by definition nothing to get from the 
owner of the domain (there is no get call). Plus.. anyone can talk aobut any URI .. who cares then if that doesnt exist?
If i see that someone said something about a URL (http://g1o.net isA uglypage) should i really go check if that someone was the owner of the URL before reusing the URL in a statement myself? 
SW is about reuse.. so since that is not possible .. i guess there is nothing wrong.

Fifth, the date part then adds the level of stability, yet cripples a bit the previous definition (people could refer to the same thing looking at the respective web page at different times..) . Having the semantic of it however allows one the 
decide whether to ignore the date and smush on that.. or do whatever else, also according to the "type".

... just the final note. In DBin pub application we provide the web site
of a pub listing engine to the users who want to talk aobut their
favorite pubs, they can locate their pub there, and dbin sticks a good
old # in the end :-) RDF things the URL and the #URI are different.
Browser see them as equals.

my 2 pragmatic cents, but will be happy to understand further or change
my mind if it is the case:-)
Giovanni

T.Heath wrote:
> Hey Chris, Richard, Danny, Daniel,
>
> Thanks for your responses, that's much much clearer now. For the record
> my approach will now go something like:
>
> 1. mint my own URIs in the mydomain.com namespace, e.g.
> http://mydomain.com/things/theredlion
>
> 2. configure the server at mydomain.com to respond to dereference
> attempts on these URIs with an HTTP303 to something like
> http://mydomain.com/things/theredlion/about whereupon the information I
> hold about the thing is returned.
>
> 3. perform content negotiation on "about" pages such that RDF or HTML is
> returned depending on the capabilities of the useragent.
>
> 4. use foaf:homepage and rdfs:seeAlso (or equivalent human-readable text
> in the HTML version) in the "about" documents/pages to make the link
> between the thing and its homepage.
>
> I hope this is at least a reasonable approximation of "the right way to
> do it" ;)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tom.
>
>   
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Daniel Larsson [mailto:daniel.larsson@servicefactory.com] 
>> Sent: 22 September 2006 09:56
>> To: Danny Ayers
>> Cc: Richard Cyganiak; T.Heath; semantic-web@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: A URI for your Favourite Pub: httpRange-14 Question
>>
>>
>> There's also http://thing-described-by.org/ redirect service, 
>> which I guess was set up for just this purpose?
>>
>> Danny Ayers wrote:
>>     
>>> For the sake of thread-completeness there's always Plan C, 
>>>       
>> use a bnode 
>>     
>>> -
>>>
>>> _:pub foaf:homepage <http://the-red-lion.com> .
>>>
>>> foaf:homepage is an owl:InverseFunctionalProperty so the pub's 
>>> unambiguously identified by reference. (The domain of 
>>>       
>> foaf:homepage is 
>>     
>>> owl:Thing not foaf:Agent, which would have been a bit disturbing in 
>>> this instance).
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Danny.
>>>
>>>       
>>
>>     
>
>
>