Re: Private naming conventions and hypermedia (was Re: Draft minutes from TAG telcon of 2008-07-24

I don't believe that:

(1)   http://loc.gov/ark:/12025/654xz321
(2)  http://rutgers.edu/ark:/12025/654xz321
(3)  ark:/12025/654xz321

Identify the same resource.

(1) and (2) are replications of the resource identified by the abstract
identifier (3).   They may be identical (and then again they may not), but
by what definition of "resource" are they the same resource?

As I see it, if you (hypothetically) were to resolve  ark:/12025/654xz321
then you are happy to get any replication.

But http://loc.gov/ark:/12025/654xz321  resolves to the replication (of the
abstract resource identified by ark:/12025/654xz321) that resides at
loc.gov.   (Please see "aside" below.)

And http://rutgers.edu/ark:/12025/654xz321  resolves to the replication (of
the abstract resource identified by ark:/12025/654xz321) that resides at
rutgers.edu.

(Aside: loc does not participate in ARK, the ARK specification mistakenly
lists loc. But for discussion sake consider this a valid example.)

So as I see it, (1) and (2) are different resources.  And (3) is a third
distinct resource.

--Ray


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>
To: "Henry S. Thompson" <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2008 12:41 PM
Subject: Private naming conventions and hypermedia (was Re: Draft minutes
from TAG telcon of 2008-07-24


>
> > HST [...] I think there's a fundamental issue we need to be clear on: is
it OK for a group of domain name owners to agree a naming convention amongst
themselves? In the ARK case, this trespasses on the WebArch advice wrt
aliasing, and in general might also seem to fall foul of the whole business
of URI opacity (that was Mark Baker's particular concern).
>
> "URI Opacity" is a term that I've found means different things to
> different folks, so I try to avoid it now.  But I do believe that
> private naming conventions do cause harm to the Web because they are
> essentially a proprietary form of link and link metadata.  If two URIs
> at different domains identify the same resource, dereferencing one of
> them should provide a declaration (Link header, RDFa, whatever) that
> the resource is the same (owl:sameAs or equivalent) as the other.
>
> >From a REST perspective, the architectural constraint that's being
> disregarded by this practice is "hypermedia as the engine of
> application state", and IMO, it's the constraint most responsible for
> imparting Web-nature.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mark.
>

Received on Friday, 25 July 2008 18:26:41 UTC