Re: Minting URIs: how to deal with unknown data structures

Hi Frans,

re. URI design patterns, I would highly recommend you to have a look at 
a presentation that describes how they are doing it at BBC [1]. 
Furthermore, I asked a question on SemanticOverflow (now 
answers.semanticweb.com) some time ago that deals with URI template 
specifications for Linked Data publishing [2]. 	Niklas Lindström 
recommended the CoIN Vocabulary [3] for that purpose. It looks quite 
interesting.

Cheers,


Bob


[1] http://www.slideshare.net/reduxd/beyond-the-polar-bear
[2] 
http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/2858/uri-template-specifications-for-linked-data-publishing
[3] http://code.google.com/p/court/wiki/COIN

On 4/15/2011 2:48 PM, Frans Knibbe wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Some newbie questions here...
>
> I have recently come in contact with the concept of Linked Data and I
> have become enthusiastic. I would like to promote the idea within my
> company (we specialize is geographical data) and within my country. I
> have read the excellent Linked Data book (“Linked Data: Evolving the Web
> into a Global Data Space”) and I think I am almost ready to start
> publishing Linked Data. I understand that it is important to get the
> URIs right, and not have to change them later. That is what my questions
> are about.
>
> I have acquired the first part (authority) of my URIs, let's say it is
> lod.mycompany.com. Now I am faced with the question: How do I come up
> with a URI scheme that will stand the test of time? I think I will start
> with publishing some FOAF data of myself and co-workers. And then
> hopefully more and more data will follow. At this moment I can not
> possible imagine which types of data we will publish. They are likely to
> have some kind of geographical component, but that is true for a lot of
> data. I believe it is not possible to come up with any hierarchical
> structure that will accommodate all types of data that might ever be
> published.
>
> So I think it is best to leave out any indication of data organization
> in the path element of the URI (i.e. http://lod.mycompany.com/people is
> a bad idea). In my understanding, I could use base URIs like
> http://lod.mycompany.com/resource, http://lod.mycompany.com/page and
> hhtp://lod.mycompany.com.data, and then use unique identifiers for all
> the things I want to publish something about. If I understand correctly,
> I don't need the URI to describe the hierarchy of my data because all
> Linked Data are self-describing. Nice.
>
> But then I am faced with the problem: What method do I use to mint my
> identifiers? Those identifiers need to be unique. Should I use a number
> sequence, or a hash function? In those cases the URIs would be uniform
> and give no indication of the type of data. But a number sequence seems
> unsafe, and in the case of a hash function I would still need to make
> some kind of structured choice of input values.
>
> I would welcome any advice on this topic from people who have had some
> more experience with publishing Linked Data.
>
> Regards,
> Frans Knibbe

Received on Sunday, 17 April 2011 13:55:11 UTC