Re: Datatypes with no (cool) URI

Okay, then maybe a PURL would help?  purl.org now supports "partial
redirects":
http://purl.org/docs/faq.html#toc1.9
That may not quite work with your ISO URIs though.

Personally, I don't think you should worry too much about a machine
expecting to be able to dereference the datatype URI to get data back.
I would expect most datatype URIs would lead to human-oriented
information, though that could gradually change.

David


On Tue, 2012-04-03 at 15:58 +0100, Phil Archer wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> Yes, one could use URL shorteners and that's probably the only sane way 
> to go but it's still not ideal because:
> 
> 1. Both Bitly and Tinyurl come with "no guarantee of service" (and  a 
> lot of tracking) - Google's goo.gl is all wrapped up with their services 
> too - not the kind of thing public administrations will be happy about 
> using. Yves Lafon's http://kwz.me is a pure shortener with no tracking 
> of any kind but it's a one man project so, again, it won't be 'good 
> enough' for public sector data.
> 
> 2. Neither a shortened URL nor the long form tell a human reader a lot 
> whereas something (non-standard I know) like urn:iso/iec:5218:2004 tells 
> you that it's an ISO standard that a human can look up. The ISO 
> catalogue URLs point to Web pages or PDFs available from those Web pages 
> so you still need to be a human to get the information. The danger would 
> be that a machine would look up the datatype URI and expect to get data 
> back, not ISO's paywall :-)
> 
> So, not ideal, but still the best (practical) solution?
> 
> 
> 
> On 03/04/2012 15:38, David Booth wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-04-03 at 14:33 +0100, Phil Archer wrote:
> >> [ . . . ] The actual URI for it is
> >> http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=36266
> >> (or rather, that's the page about the spec but that's a side issue for
> >> now).
> >>
> >> That URI is just horrible and certainly not a 'cool URI'. The Eurostat
> >> one is no better.
> >>
> >> Does the datatype URI have to resolve to anything (in theory no, but in
> >> practice? Would a URN be appropriate?
> >
> > It's helpful to be able to click on the URI to figure out what exactly
> > was meant.  How about just using a URI shortener, such as tinyurl.com or
> > bit.ly?
> >
> >
> 

-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

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Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2012 15:20:00 UTC