RE: "the main thing described by this document" (was lcsh.info RDFa SKOS and content negotiation - use of RDF-style # IDs in RDFa?

> Steven Pemberton wrote:
> [ . . . ]
> > I absolutely support an easy way to say "the main thing described by
> > this document", a) since it is such an important and
> > frequent use case,
> > b) authoring it should be easy, and c) I understood at a
> > talk at XTech
> > that a lot of people are already doing this wrong.

This could be done using http://thing-described-by.org if I changed the delegation of authority the redirect rule at thing-described-by.org to treat an empty query string as a relative URI meaning "this document".   That site is a 303-redirect server that is used to mint URIs of things that are described by documents.   Basically, for any absolute document URI u, the URI

        http://thing-described-by.org?u

refers to the thing described by document u.  At present u is restricted to be an absolute URI, but I could easily change this restriction to permit an empty relative URI to be treated as referring to "this document".  This would allow a document such as dans-car.html to use

        http://thing-described-by.org?

to refer to the thing described by dans-car.html -- presumably Dan's car.  Or if that URI looks too long then http://t-d-b.org? could do the same thing.

As explained at
http://dbooth.org/2006/urn2http/
there isn't any need to use urn:tdb: URIs for this -- http: URIs can do the same thing, but better.

Of course, this approach doesn't have a standards body behind it, but a standards body certainly could adopt this approach, and it illustrates the fact that it is unnecessary to create a new URN scheme or sub-scheme to accomplish this.



David Booth, Ph.D.
HP Software
+1 617 629 8881 office  |  dbooth@hp.com
http://www.hp.com/go/software

Statements made herein represent the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of HP unless explicitly so stated.

Received on Monday, 6 October 2008 18:57:17 UTC