Re: Compact Uniform Resource Identifier (CURI)

Hi,

Some initial comments based on a brief review. I see Mark Harrison has
already noted the name clash with CURIE.

Based on the working group charter I had assumed that the working
group would be publishing guidance on creating and maintaining
persistent URIs and URI schemes that covered similar topics to the UK
and Australian guidance [1, 2] and RFC 7320 [3]. The URI Design and
Ownership draft is also relevant [4] (particularly with respect to
some of my comments below).

Is that material to be covered elsewhere? It would be really useful to
see some of the existing deployed guidance generalised into reusable
best practices relevant to data on the web.

However this document profiles existing standards (HTTP, URIs, etc) by
limiting, e.g. length/format of domain names, legal characters in
URIs, etc. In practice, these might be useful things to do and
something to consider when designing a URI scheme, but I'm not sure
its correct to mandate a single approach complete with conformance
requirements.

Some specific questions:

* Why is URI length the overriding design characteristic?
* Why are longer domain names "bad"?
* Why must the path only have a single component? Plenty of existing,
stable URI schemes have longer paths
* Why must language codes be given using a dotted extension?
* Why must URIs only contain ASCII characters? RDF 1.1 was recently
updated to use IRIs which has a larger repertoire of characters
* Why use specific reserved parameters, rather than existing
mechanisms, e.g. HEAD, OPTIONS, HTTP headers to communicate metadata?
* Why the recommendation to use file URIs for data to be published to
the web? I don't think the distinction between static/dynamic data
belongs here anyway.

As it stands this specification looks like it would declare rather a
lot of existing well-maintained and well-designed URI schemes as
"invalid".

Cheers,

L.

[1]. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/designing-uri-sets-for-the-uk-public-sector
[2]. https://github.com/AGLDWG/TR/wiki/URI-Guidelines-for-publishing-linked-datasets-on-data.gov.au-v0.1
[3]. http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7320.txt
[4]. http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-uri-get-off-my-lawn-05

On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 3:44 PM,  <Manuel.CARRASCO-BENITEZ@ec.europa.eu> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I changed the name of the draft from
>   Old   : Best Practice for Web Data URI (DAURI)
>   New : Compact Uniform Resource Identifier (CURI)
>
> It is at
>   http://dragoman.org/curi
>
> A copy for the people having problems reading dragoman at
>   https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/site/med/dragoman/curi
>
> CURI must be considered a new version of DAURI. The name change is to better reflect the "compact" (term copied from RFC3986) aspect over the "data" aspect, though the data requirements must be fully supported.  I will continue to work and the objective is to have the First Public Working Draft by the 30 September 2014. I will change our wiki pages and load it to Github when appropriate.
>
> Regards
> Tomas
>
>



-- 
Leigh Dodds
Freelance Technologist
Open Data, Linked Data Geek
t: @ldodds
w: ldodds.com
e: leigh@ldodds.com

Received on Thursday, 28 August 2014 15:31:15 UTC