Best practice file-extensions for RDF/SKOS resources

We are setting up a repository of definitions used in Open Geospatial
Consortium web services, so that xlink references in Geography Markup
Language documents resolve to something useful. 

In some cases the definitions will be structured using special syntax
defined within GML (e.g. for coordinate reference systems). But in most
cases the definitions are structured generically, so we propose to provide
alternative representations in GML (which has a <Definition> element for
this purpose) and in RDF/SKOS using the RDF/XML syntax. The intention is to
support content negotiation using the http Accept: header. The mime-types
are application/gml+xml and application/rdf+xml, respectively.

In the short term these representations will be persisted as little XML
documents in a file-system. But since all are still XML, I am wondering what
is the recommended practice for the file suffix. I had proposed to structure
the tree with a terminal directory corresponding to the terminal field in
the URI, containing files called 'gml.xml' and 'rdf.xml'. For example, the
URI 

http://www.opengis.net/def/objectType/ISO-19107/2003/GM_Polygon 

would be supported by these paths on the server

def/objectType/ISO-1907/2003/GM_Polygon/gml.xml
def/objectType/ISO-1907/2003/GM_Polygon/rdf.xml

However, a colleague has questioned whether the naming convention is
optimal. I'm interested to know of other opinions and experiences relating
to this. 

--------------------------------------------------------
Simon Cox

European Commission, Joint Research Centre, 
Institute for Environment and Sustainability, 
Spatial Data Infrastructures Unit, TP 262 
Via E. Fermi, 2749, I-21027 Ispra (VA), Italy 
Tel: +39 0332 78 3652
Fax: +39 0332 78 6325
mailto:simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu 
http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/simon-cox 

SDI Unit: http://sdi.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ 
IES Institute: http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
JRC: http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
--------------------------------------------------------

Received on Tuesday, 9 February 2010 11:12:05 UTC