IRI sets in the real world

During our meeting with Tim BL last November [1], he made a strong 
argument for only allowing resource grouping by URI prefix. This goes 
back to the early days of RDF and before that into PICS where 
descriptions apply to 'everything with a URL beginning with 
http://www.example.org".

POWDER, of course, wants to go a lot further than that and to be able to 
define a group of resources in a very flexible way. To support this, 
here are some real world examples of web sites where a simple URI prefix 
will not suffice.

Firstly, and most obviously, there's http://www.w3.org. That's fine for 
a lot of the documents but what about http://validator.w3.org, 
lists.w3.org and so on? We must be able to include sub domains as well.

Yahoo! uses a lot of sub domains for a variety of things but there's no 
simple pattern here either. For example

http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Romance___Relationships/

and

http://tech.dir.groups.yahoo.com/dir/Computers___Internet/

So just using sub domains won't work either.

And here's one with a nice pattern in the query string too.

http://www.ebgames.com/search.asp?N=139+106

is a list of Role playing games for Play Station 2

And here's a list of Play Station 2 games rated E by the ESRB:

http://www.ebgames.com/search.asp?N=139+51

So here the N=139 means 'Play Station 2' and its the 106 or 51 that 
makes the difference between role play (division by genre) and E rated 
(division by age appropriateness).

The same is true for many online stores where it is the query string, 
more than anything, that determines the page content.

Social network sites, of course, use identifiers in the query string for 
individual profiles, groups, events and so on.

Phil.

[1] 
http://www.w3.org/blog/powder/2007/11/10/summary_of_face_to_face_meeting_held_dur_2007
-- 
Phil Archer
Chief Technical Officer,
Family Online Safety Institute
w. http://www.fosi.org/people/philarcher/

Received on Wednesday, 26 March 2008 13:49:11 UTC