Re: Minting URIs is bad?

On 3/2/09 02:58, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> On 2/2/09 8:13 PM, 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.
>> (Re-reading it, I find I may have not given sufficient importance to
>> the statements about "avoid creating artificial URIs ".)
>> Anyway, whatever Dan's opinion, I think I am in great agreement with
>> Richard.
> I understand the expanse of Dan's concern perimeter, but I do need
> clarification about what constitutes an "artificial URI" if we hold true
> to "Open World" assumptions :-)

Fair point. I guess all URIs are artifacts, and begin their life unknown 
to the rest of the world. A better name than "artificial URI" might be 
"Alice in Wonderland URIs", by which I mean, URIs whose meaning isn't 
yet widely shared throughout the Web community:

	'''“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, 
“it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”'''

If URIs are to be used as terms ('words'), they need to be richly 
embedded in multiple sites, services, datasets. If I merely declare that 
http://id.danbri.org/kingsley is an identifier for you, it isn't yet a 
Semantic Web "word". But if I get this URI embedded in software, 
external databases, interesting RDF documents etc., it starts to become 
one. My main point was that progressing along this scale is easier if 
the URI-minting party sticks to some (as yet undocumented) practices 
around persistence, privacy, data etiquette ...

Quick reply also to Richard (I'm in a meeting),  ... yup, I agree on 
"“Don't trust and re-use every random identifier you find.” ". My post 
wasn't anti-minting, but a suggestion firstly that additional metadata 
and documented best practice about identifiers (and identifier sets) 
will be useful, and a plea for special care and clear practice when 
identifying people.

cheers,

Dan

''
http://danbri.org/

Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 11:16:20 UTC