Re: Are cool URIs for life?

Hi all,

I don’t check this email address very often any more, but this conversation caught my attention.

Two quick points:

1) Persistence of URIs: This problem has been well known and acknowledged since at least 1995 when PURLs were first introduced. On the positive side, we still have URLs and DNS 22 years later.

2) On the negative side, do any of us really think that DNS is going to be around for too many more decades? I rather doubt it.

We had some excellent discussions at WWW 2017 in Perth regarding various problems with distributed and centralised identifiers, and mappings between the two. It seems to me that we are getting conceptually close to defining global identifier mechanisms without the need for DNS. That would cause a bit of work to adjust to, wouldn’t it?

Regards,
Dave
-- 
David Wood
http://about.me/david_wood 

On 28 April 2017 at 18:51:39, Ivan Herman (ivan@w3.org) wrote:

Just reacting on this somewhat philosophically… shouldn't the subject say "Are cool URIs for life and death?"  

The problem is that there is no guarantee that the HTTP URI-s will remain unchanged. The recent HTTP to HTTPS push is just one of the most visible signs of how fragile it is. But, for example, can you really be sure that you can maintain "csarven.ca", or I can maintain "www.ivan-herman.net" for life? What if the business model for domain names changes radically (say, my current registar goes belly up) in such a way that I cannot keep the domain name? What if the political environment forces a person to use a national domain rather than an international one like ".net"? Or only Canadian citizens are allowed to use a ".ca" domain (unless you are a Canadian citizen in which case this is not a problem)? And, of course, what happens when I pass away? How long would my domain name stay around, and how can I ensure that another person, called Ivan Herman, doesn't decide to reuse (unknowingly) the same domain in, say, 30 years when I may not be around?  

The problem I see is that we try to piggyback a very very strong feature and requirement like our personal identity on a feature/business environment that does not really care about all those consequences. Ideally, we should have a separate TLD whose very purpose is to provide identities to people, and would, somehow, ensure services that answer to all these questions. But, afaik, we do not have that. (There is a TLD called .name, but is very seldom used and I have no idea what special features it has, if any.)  

(In the meantime, because I moved my web site to https, I announce https://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf#me as my personal ID, and I add an owl:sameAs to http://www.ivan-herman.net/foaf#me in the corresponding RDFa/Turtle file.)  

Ivan  


> On 27 Apr 2017, at 14:24, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> wrote:  
>  
> Are "cool URIs don't change" for life?  
>  
> Would the policing of this fall under the jurisdiction of pedantic-web?  
>  
> Discuss.  
>  
> Aside: Please help me decide on this burning issue that I've been  
> putting off: https://twitter.com/csarven/status/857569335908454401  
>  
> -Sarven  
> http://csarven.ca/#i  
>  


----  
Ivan Herman, W3C  
Publishing@W3C Technical Lead  
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/  
mobile: +31-641044153  
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704