cool urls and redirects

To what degree is it a best practice to implement "cool" URLs as  
redirects?

I manage a small database of electronic texts (approximately 20,000  
items). Because the content is in a database I can create reams of  
reports against it. Browsable lists by title, author, and keyword/ 
subject. I can index the lot with Solr/Lucene. I can create various  
versions of the content: 1) plain text, 2) simple HTML, 3) HTML  
complete with a handy-dandy floating palette supporting various  
services against the texts, 4) PDF. Etc. About 18 months ago I started  
creating RDF files representing the texts. For example, Thomas More's  
Utopia. [1]

My next self-assigned project is to present my small database as a set  
of linked data. To this end I have written a mod_perl module that  
dereferences a URI. For example [2], given a key, the module  
negotiates content, returns a 303, and a URL to RDF or HTML  
representations.

Now, my question is, should the URLs I return be the long ugly ones  
pointing to actual files on my file system, or can they be "cool" URLs  
that are actually redirects? In other words, instead of returning  
something like this:

http://infomotions.com/etexts/literature/english/1500-1599/more-utopia-221.rdf

is it acceptable to return something like this and have it redirected  
to the URL above:

http://infomotions.com/etexts/rdf/more-utopia-221

Similarly, when returning URLs pointing to an HTML representation,  
should I return A or something more like B:

A. http://infomotions.com/etexts/literature/english/1500-1599/more-utopia-221.htm
B. http://infomotions.com/etexts/html/more-utopia-221

Once I figure out the answers to these questions, then I can start  
cleaning up my RDF files and including the "best" URIs in them.


[1] Utopia - http://infomotions.com/etexts/literature/english/1500-1599/more-utopia-221.rdf
[2] dereference - http://infomotions.com/etexts/id/more-utopia-221


-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame

(574) 631-8604

Received on Friday, 24 July 2009 21:44:51 UTC