Re: Minting URIs is bad?

Hugh Glaser wrote:
> Wow. A couple of great messages.
> Interestingly (for me) I read Dan's message as not being antagonistic to the minting of URIs; rather as an excellent 
> discussion of some of the issues.

I read Dan's comments similarly. Minting URIs should obviously be easy 
and encouraged, particularly at the moment where we still don't have 
enough URIs for things! :)

And within the context of the web as a whole, URIs will break. That is a 
given. But within a specific community of practice we might reasonably 
ask whether we can do better? I don't necessarily mean the LOD 
community, and am instead thinking about the contexts of specific 
industries or communities.

The scholarly publishing industry is a useful example. The wider 
endeavour of attempting to tie together the worlds scholarly literature 
to allow a stable basis for "building on the shoulders of giants", has 
meant that that community has adopted practices to try and encourage 
stability of linking that works within the web architecture: redirection 
services supported/funded by that community.

This gives local stability within a wider context that is more unstable, 
i.e. the shifting sands of the web at large.

I think its reasonable to wonder whether elements of the Linked Data 
cloud might eventually become similarly "shored up". I think 
understanding the wider issues and recognising the needs of individual 
communities is useful.

But that doesn't, and shouldn't, stop us from churning out URIs wherever 
we need 'em ;)

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Talis Platform Programme Manager
e: leigh.dodds@talis.com
w: http://www.talis.com/platform
w: http://www.ldodds.com/blog

Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 10:48:19 UTC