Re: URIs & Namespaces

hello mike.

> For what it is worth, I completely agree with your thoughts regarding the
> use of URLs to identify place names and have similar interests. As a matter
> of fact, I've been wanting to develop a process to cultivate and maintain a
> global list of URLs for placenames has been a goal of mine for several years
> now.  I'd love to discuss your needs and use cases and tell you about my
> ideas perchance we may be able to collaborate on a mutually beneficial
> solution.

i am very interested in this idea of a place name vocabulary, but this 
is just one part of what i want to do. there are already huge databases 
of place names collected from various points of interest (getty's 
thesaurus, the alexandria digital library gazetteer), and i think that 
place name vocabularies are important. but i doubt that

a) any vocabulary can reasonably assume to be complete and the one 
everybody is using, and

b) there is one universal way of defining vocabularies that works well 
for everybody defining them.

so i want two degrees of separation (like xml has them).

a) namespaces allow you to specify which vocabulary you are using, and 
they allow other to identify vocabularies known to them.

b) how a vocabulary is defined is up to the one defining it. the big 
ones (such as getty or alexandria) have their own homegrown methods, and 
they are unlikely to switch over to something else.

the thing i am interested in are spaces as a social concept. if i talk 
about "my favorite pizza place downtown", this is not useful for the 
general public, but highly useful for everybody who knows me. so what i 
want is an environment where these social vocabularies can evolve, can 
be used, can be matched and mapped, and all of this should be expressed 
in web-level concepts.

so, the whole application scenario and idea probably is not relevant for 
this mailing list, but i really want to find out what the general view 
is about having these namespace concepts embedded in a uri scheme.

cheers,

dret.

Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 02:12:53 UTC