The URI of a RDDL "nature"

Hi Jonathan,

If you saw the minutes of the last couple of TAG meetings, you may
have noticed that there's been some expression of discomfort about the
"nature" URIs in RDDL. Unlike the "purpose" URIs which are all
identified by anchors in http://www.rddl.org/purposes, the nature URIs
are drawn from a variety of sources.

As you already observed, the use of "http://www.iso.ch/" as the nature
of an ISO standard is controversial for a few reasons. The most
technic argument against it, I think, is that it conflates "a website"
and "a nature" so that any descriptive statement made about a nature
must (by virtue of the use of the same URI) also be a statement about
the website. To a greater or lesser extent, the same argument
applies to several other nature URIs as well.

On the whole, I've been persuaded by the arguements and I think it
would have been less controversial if the nature URIs had all followed
the same pattern as the purpose URIs (as several already do).

In approaching namespaceDocument-8, the TAG has been very conscious of
the problem associated with changing URIs that are already used in
deployed software. But it occurred to me that very few of the "nature"
URIs are likely to actually be used in deployed *software* *today*.

I would hazard that only the following are actually used:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema
http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#
http://www.xml.gr.jp/xmlns/relaxCore
http://www.xml.gr.jp/xmlns/relaxNamespace
http://www.ascc.net/xml/schematron
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/text/css
http://www.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/media-types/application/xml-dtd

And of those, only the first is really used by most implementations.

It is with this in mind that the TAG wonders if you'd be willing to
establish new URIs with the pattern http://www.rddl.org/natures#<term>
for the natures. I would suggest preserving, but deprecating, the
natures listed above (so that there would be two natures for those
resources) and simply dropping the rest.

Note that this doesn't make www.rddl.org the gatekeeper for new
natures any more than it does for new purposes.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman.Walsh@Sun.COM / XML Standards Architect / Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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