Re: a URI is a name (tel uri scheme and VCARD RDF)

At 09:36 25.11.2002 -0800, Paul Prescod wrote:
>Alexander Jerusalem wrote:
>
>>This paper shows quite well the contradictory notions of what a URI
>>should be. On the one hand it says URIs should not change and be opaque.
>>On the other hand meaning is encoded into URIs, such as protocols and
>>hierarchies and different parts are extracted and acted upon by
>>different agents. The topic of what should be in an ID has been
>>discussed at great length long before the web was invented (i.e. in the
>>context of relational databases) and I tend to be on the side of
>>meaningless unique IDs cleanly separated from information about how to
>>get the stuff the ID refers to.
>
>Yes, this issue has been discussed before there was a Web and every single 
>day since there has been a Web. So I won't go into again. Suffice to say 
>that pretty much everything that could be said on the issue of separating 
>identifiers and locators has been said. I sent you the URIs to make you 
>aware that this is not a part of the architecture that fell into place 
>thoughtlessly, but is in fact carefully designed to be the way it is 
>(right or wrong).

I have carefully read the paper that you refered me to (not for the first 
time) and many other papers on this topic. Many good points have been made. 
Nevertheless RDF gives us some freedom in deciding how we can assemble our 
IDs. So what I am discussing is not aimed at changing any standards but 
rather at the question of how we can best make use of our freedoms within 
that framework to take design decisions.

Received on Monday, 25 November 2002 12:57:05 UTC