COMURI comments

Hi, Tomas,

I am sending my comments.

Thank you for your work. The COMURI document is very well written and I
agree with short URIs. What I do not agree is to recommend a unique scheme
to do that.

The discussion about URIs began with the Web. In this very first
document, Universal
Resource Identifiers -- Axioms of Web Architecture
<http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Axioms.html>, there is already an assertion
about opacity: "A very important axiom of the Web is that in general the
only thing you can use an identifier for is to refer to an object. When you
are not dereferencing, you should not look at the contents of the URI
string to gain other information.".

I think the most important thing when defining a scheme to name URIs is to
have a way of defining names that should last (Cool URIs don't change
<http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html>). Each admin could define a
scheme that she thinks could help to manage the assigning of URI's names.
But I, personally, do not agree with guessing as the motivation.

In the COMURI document, the first thing that is said is
1.1 Rationale
The intention is to have compact URIs easy for the users (humans and
machines); URI patterns should be intuitive to facilitate URI guessing.

I think that intuition and guessing is difficult to control and depends on
culture. Different cultures, chance of different guessing.

Let´s see the example of the document:
2.2 New terms
Some are news terms and some are just rewriting of existing terms. URI
guessing
    From a pattern, it should be easy to guess other URIs. For example, if
http://example.com/mon gives the Monday weather, http://example.com/tue
should give the Tuesday weather.

Well, this is a guess for people who speak English. What about someone that
wants the document in Portuguese for segunda-feira?
If we use the recommendation of the COMURI document about suffixes for
different languages we should have "http://example.com/mon.pt".
How to guess the document for terça-feira. If it is a person that do not
speak English? How to guess "http://example.com/tue.pt"?

I am pointing to that to show how easy is to define a guessing scheme that
will not work.

I also think that the COMURI document talk about URIs that identify
documents and not all kinds of resources. If, for example, the URI is an
identification of the resource "laufer", what is the meaning of a version,
format or language for this resource. In the DWBP WG we are dealing with a
lot of different types of metadata that will not be identified by a suffix
in the URI. The idea of suffixes applies only to resources that are
documents (a mix of URL with URI).

As Phil pointed in the call, the discussion about dereferencing resources
has some proposals:  Cool URIs for the Semantic Web
<http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/>. I think that proposing a way of obtaining
metadata with an empty query should be a separate discussion and should
take into account all the other approaches and issues.

I repeat that I agree that short URIs could be a good practice. But URIs
are only identifiers and I think that is more safe to use searching
mechanisms, using metadata about the resources, to find what you want.

Best Regards,
Laufer

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