Re: URIs within URIs

On 08/22/2014 11:44 AM, Luca Matteis wrote:
> Dear LOD community,
>
> I'm wondering whether there has been any research regarding the idea
> of having URIs contain an actual URI, that would then resolve
> information about what the linked dataset states about the input URI.

That is the technique used by Thing-Described-By.org, which is a 
303-redirect service for easily minting URIs for things that are not 
information resources.  However, the purpose was the opposite: given the 
URI of a page that describes the thing for which you want a URI, it 
allows you to easily create a new URI for that thing, and the new URI 
will 303-redirect to its description when dereferenced.

For example, suppose I want to mint a URI for myself, and I have a web 
page at http://dbooth.org/2005/dbooth/ that describes me.  Then I could 
make a URI for me by appending that web page URI to 
"http://thing-described-by.org/?" to form:

   http://thing-described-by.org/?http://dbooth.org/2005/dbooth/

When that new URI is dereferenced, the server will perform a 
303-redirect to http://dbooth.org/2005/dbooth/ .   The point is that it 
allows you to easily have a separate URI for the page and the thing 
described by that page, without having to do any server configuration.

The site was created in 2005 when the idea of using of 303 redirects for 
non-information resources -- things that are not web pages -- was being 
discussed and there was concern that many people do not have 
configuration access their servers to set up 303 redirects.   The code 
that implements the site is quite simple, and can be viewed and reused 
by anybody who wants to run this on their own server:
http://thing-described-by.org/?showfile=.

BTW, the only syntax incompatibility I noticed in using a URI as the 
query string of another URI is that there can only be one fragment 
identifier.  So if the embedded URI has a fragment identifier, then the 
"#" would have to be percent-encoded.

David

Received on Saturday, 23 August 2014 16:02:58 UTC