Re: Trailing slashes in RDF

On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 12:25 PM, Phil Archer <phil@philarcher.org> wrote:

> Dan,
>
> IIRC you asked a while back on this list about the semantics associated
> with two URIs that differ only in the presence/absence of a trailing slash.
> I've been spending some time looking at the RDF available for ORCIDs
> recently, for example [1]. It's difficult to spot but in fact they use a
> URI like http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704 to refer to a person (in
> this case Ivan Herman) and the same URI with a trailing slash to refer to
> his online account.
>
> Clearly these two URIs *are* different and are being used consistently to
> distinguish between a real world object and its description, but, by
> convention, do you think the difference is sufficient to be regarded as
> 'safe?' Is orcid.org following good practice here?
>
> FWIW, no, one URI does not redirect to the other.
>

This might differ depending on the web server, or the version of a given
web server, some might redirect from one to the other, some might not. From
a human standpoint, visually speaking when looking at the URI, I don't find
the difference very obvious.

For those reasons, I don't think it's a good or safe way to disambiguate
between a real world object and its description.

Steph.


>
> WDYT?
>
> Phil.
>
> [1] http://i-sieve.com/cgi-bin/HTTP_Headers.cgi?url=http%3A%
> 2F%2Forcid.org%2F0000-0003-0782-2704&UA=ttl&get=on
>
> --
>
> Phil Archer
> http://philarcher.org/
> +44 (0)7887 767755
> @philarcher1
>
>


-- 
Steph.