Re: APIs to work with data on the web

Is not a URI an application programming INTERFACE?  And would we not wish the use of URIs to be recommended in APIs?

Forgive me if this is a dumb question. 
 
Regards,

Steve


----- Original Message -----
From: Leigh Dodds [leigh@ldodds.com]
Sent: 03/18/2014 04:38 PM GMT
To: Manuel.CARRASCO-BENITEZ@ec.europa.eu
Cc: laufer@globo.com; Steven Adler; Deirdre.Lee@deri.org; mail@makxdekkers.com; newton@nic.br; public-dwbp-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: APIs to work with data on the web



Hi,

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 4:23 PM, <Manuel.CARRASCO-BENITEZ@ec.europa.eu>wrote:

>  Forgot ... nothing wrong with having APIs in addition to URIs; but it is
> essential to have URIs.
>

It's more useful to characterise this as a SHOULD rather than a MUST
(essential), and also fine tune what those URIs are representing

For example:

If you want to publish "3 star data" then you MUST have a stable URI for
the dataset and SHOULD have a URI for each version of the dataset (for
archiving), as well as a "latest version" URI. Those are best practices to
support linking and archiving of datasets.

If you want to publish "5 star data" then you MUST have a stable URI for
everything in your dataset AND the dataset, or re-use existing URIs.
Publishing Linked Data is a best practice, and the use of URIs follows from
that (you can't do Linked Data otherwise).

There are specific best practices for creating cool, useful URIs for both
of these scenarios. I've captured some of those patterns here:

http://patterns.dataincubator.org/book/identifier-patterns.html

Cheers,

L.