Re: Best Practice for Renaming OWL Vocabulary Elements

Hi Michael:
On May 18, 2011, at 8:37 PM, Michael F Uschold wrote:

> Alan, I'm glad you made that suggestion.  I was also glad to see that Tim-BL acknowledged that the URIs are just identifiers.  

Using URIs as identifiers does not imply they must not have human-readable components. Otherwise, there was no need for alphanumeric URIs and the DNS system at all.

> As you know, noone seems to be treating them that way, nor is there good tool support to make it easy to do -- probably the main reason the practice persists.
> 
> Part of Martin's argument is based on what he already did, given that, maybe he is doing the right thing now.
> 
> Moving forward for the broader semantic web community,  the more interesting question is, if Martin was starting from scratch right now, would there still be any good arguments for having URIs with meaningful names?
The only thing I would do differently when restarting now would be a using shorter names for a few elements, and enforcing a bit of additional terminological consistency.

> Given the RDFa context:
> 	• How much effort would it be, in terms of extra tool support, or training users etc.
> 	• Would it have even been possible to get GR off the ground in todays market place w/o meaningful URIs?

It would be disaster to use URIs without meaningful names.


Martin

Received on Thursday, 19 May 2011 08:52:58 UTC