Re: Real data

Sandro Hawke wrote:
> But I strongly encourage you to resist this temptation!  It's so much
> more cool to be able to actually surf the data, using the URI/name for
> a protein/person/property/whatever to automatically and efficiently
> get more data about it.

Well, I'll reconsider. In fact I have already switched back and forth 
several times...

The problem is that I can't guarantee that anything will ever be 
directly resolvable in a stable way, especially as I have so far not 
been able to convince the people in charge of the web site to support a 
more logical naming scheme - some people just won't listen to technical 
arguments :-) And if your identifiers can't be resolved directly, I feel 
it is better to be clear about that and use URNs, right?

Another issue is that we reference a lot of data in other databases. 
Virtually none of these databases have stable URLs for accessing their 
resources (/cgi-bin/ etc). We therefore keep a list that allows us to 
map identifiers for a given database to the address-of-the-day.