- From: Rob Tice <rob.tice@k-int.com>
- Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 15:08:35 +0100
- To: "'Simon Cox'" <simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu>, <public-esw-thes@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <012e01caf36e$f3965bf0$dac313d0$@tice@k-int.com>
Absolutely, didn't mean to sidestep your important point about URI structure. Cheers Rob PS Is it still data.gov.uk J From: Simon Cox [mailto:simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu] Sent: 14 May 2010 14:52 To: 'Rob Tice'; public-esw-thes@w3.org Subject: URIs for public data - was RE: URIs for Concept & ConceptScheme - best practice? Rob - I'm somewhat familar with the data.gov.uk policy in this area, in particular the plans from the UK Location Program (I've been providing feedback to the latter, on behalf of JRC who lead the INSPIRE initiative, and the OGC where I chair the 'Naming Authority'). As I understand it data.gov.uk is aware of the issue, and is planning to address the problem by using domains that represent concepts (schools, roads, etc) rather than the todays name for the govt. department that administers the resource (dcsf yesterday, education today). This makes sense to me - the name has to be robust in the face of typical organizational instability. But that's about the beginning of the URI: I'm focussing on the other end ;-) Simon -------------------------------------------------------- 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> mailto:simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu <http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/simon-cox> http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/simon-cox SDI Unit: <http://sdi.jrc.ec.europa.eu/> http://sdi.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ IES Institute: <http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/> http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ JRC: <http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/> http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ -------------------------------------------------------- Any opinions expressed are personal unless otherwise indicated. _____ From: Rob Tice [mailto:rob.tice@k-int.com] Sent: Friday, 14 May 2010 15:44 To: 'Simon Cox'; public-esw-thes@w3.org Subject: RE: URIs for Concept & ConceptScheme - best practice? Simon Anyone who is in the UK at the mo and is in the business of managing identifiers for resources within government departments might possibly be ruminating on why uri's don't actually always make good identifiers. For info. <http://www.education.gov.uk> http://www.education.gov.uk versus <http://www.dcsf.gov.uk> http://www.dcsf.gov.uk Proper separation between identification and resolution anyone (Ducks behind the parapet J) Cheers Rob From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org [mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Simon Cox Sent: 14 May 2010 13:42 To: public-esw-thes@w3.org Subject: URIs for Concept & ConceptScheme - best practice? I'm thinking about identifier policies for ontologies and concept-schemes. In work that I have done previously on identifier policies for Open Geospatial Consortium and for Commission for Geoscience Information we used the identifier scheme largely as a way to enforce certain governance arrangements for resource publication. The general principle is that a URI is composed of a number of fields. A new URI can only be minted if the values in all the fields are valid; the allowable value for each field must come from a specific register; and different parties are authorized to modify different registers. So we end up with a delegation system. This kind of scheme uses the URI structure for internal governance purposes, within the community. But http URIs have a 'path-like' structure which can be interpreted as a tree. Read in this way, the URI scheme impies certain relationships between resources, in particular 'ownership' of children by their parents. Notwithstanding the REST principle that information is in the representation and not the identifier, Cool URIs can be interpreted by users, and typically support navigation through tweaking the URI (many refs). This kind of scheme is aimed at external users. Following this approach: is it smart to have the URI for a SKOS concept to be just an extension of the URI for the SKOS concept scheme? e.g. < <http://resource.geosciml.org/concept/unit-rank/bed> http://resource.geosciml.org/concept/unit-rank/bed> skos:inScheme < <http://resource.geosciml.org/concept/unit-rank> http://resource.geosciml.org/concept/unit-rank>. I'm assuming slash URIs, since I want the server to do most of the work, supporting content-negotiation, etc. The advantage in this approach is that a casual user can navigate between parent and child by URI twiddling. But possible gotchas are (1) it assumes exactly one parent - it requires every concept to be in a scheme - it privileges one scheme above any others (though I think there is no limit on the number of inScheme properties a Concept can have?) (2) there must be some others I'd be interested in comments. -------------------------------------------------------- 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> mailto:simon.cox@jrc.ec.europa.eu <http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/simon-cox> http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/simon-cox SDI Unit: <http://sdi.jrc.ec.europa.eu/> http://sdi.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ IES Institute: <http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/> http://ies.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ JRC: <http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/> http://www.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ -------------------------------------------------------- Any opinions expressed are personal unless otherwise indicated.
Received on Friday, 14 May 2010 14:09:10 UTC