RE: Minting URIs is bad?

"a plea for special care and clear practice when identifying people" -- hear hear! 


-----Original Message-----
From: public-lod-request@w3.org [mailto:public-lod-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Dan Brickley
Sent: 03 February 2009 11:16
To: Kingsley Idehen
Cc: Hugh Glaser; Richard Cyganiak; Sergio Fernández; Linked Data community
Subject: 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/


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Received on Tuesday, 3 February 2009 11:20:29 UTC