Re: URI policy for thesaurus concepts

On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Miles, AJ (Alistair)  wrote:

> On the basis of the previous discussion on URIs for concepts, I'm going to
> offer the recommendation to thesaurus owners that they use http: based uris
> without fragment identifiers as URIs for their concepts.
>
> So for example:
>
> GEMET thesaurus URI: http://www.eionet.eu.int/GEMET/[version]
>
> GEMET concept URIs: http://www.eionet.eu.int/GEMET/[version]/[conceptID]
>
> Reason for going with http: based URIs is it seems generally agreed that it
> is desirable to have the concept URIs directly resolving to something.
>
> Reason for going with / and not # is so that the concept ID is included in
> an http GET request and not lost as it would be if it came after a #.
>
> I.e. decision based on purely practical considerations.
>
> Anybody want to shoot this down before I approach GEMET (& others) with
> this?

Personally I like this approach. The recent TAG document endorses a REST
view; so basically you're saying that

	http://www.eionet.eu.int/GEMET/[version]

"names" the thesaurus, and

	http://www.eionet.eu.int/GEMET/[version]/[conceptID]

"names" the particular concept. That's fine - I ought to be able to ask
(via content negotiation) for a representation of a concept (or a
thesaurus) by an HTTP request for each of those URIs. What advice are
you offering on the stuff that's found at the end of those URIs?

It'd be reasonable to generate (for instance) RDF describing an
individual concept (that perhaps links it to related concepts) but it's
not immediately clear to me what content might live at the "whole
thesaurus" URI. Perhaps the whole thesaurus? Or a document with RDDL
content that points to related web services, etc..?




-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
( echo "ouroboros"; cat ) > /dev/fd/0 # it's like talking to yourself sometimes

Received on Friday, 30 April 2004 11:22:56 UTC