Re: Question about identifiers

Hi,

A prime requirement of good URI minting is to not put any meaning in the
URI, at least no meaning that is somehow intended for consumers. Everything
that needs to be said about a resource, like its membership of data
collections or its versioning, can be said in the data that is returned
when the URI is dereferenced.

URI schemes like /{municipality}/{quarter}/{neighbourhood} could be
dangerous, because consumers could inadvertently try to derive meaning from
such an URI. The usefulness of such a scheme in URI minting is also
doubtful, because administrative structure can change in time. That could
complicate the URI minting procedures over time.

I do wonder to what extent common web crawlers try to parse URIs and attach
meaning to URI parts.

Regards,
Frans



On 18 August 2016 at 22:55, Byron Cochrane <bcochrane@linz.govt.nz> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I like the guidance under the URI-Strategy under Hierarchical URIs
> generally, but have some reservations to this intelligent identifiers
> approach.
> For metadata access I think it is a good thing.  Most metadata for an
> individual features will usually reside at the dataset or collection
> (better term) level.  This hierarchical approach makes this metadata easy
> to access.
>
> But this built in intelligence makes the permanence of the URIs more
> difficult.  For example, administrative boundaries change through mergers
> and annexations.  A spatial thing that was in one collection is now in
> another.  The URIs for these things then confuse more than help.  URI
> redirects are one way to deal with this, but perhaps tracking these
> relationships through applied ontologies such as skos:broader and
> skos:narrower is the better practice?
>
> No answers from me here, just questions.
>
> Cheers,
> Byron
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Linda van den Brink [l.vandenbrink@geonovum.nl]
> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2016 8:28 PM
> To: Joshua Lieberman (jlieberman@tumblingwalls.com)
> Cc: SDW WG (public-sdw-wg@w3.org)
> Subject: Question about identifiers
>
> Hi Josh,
>
> Coming back to the telecon yesterday:
>
>
> <joshlieberman> Should identifiers be part of a system for the features of
> interest?
>
> joshlieberman: making identifiers part of a system, where the features are
> part of the system?
> ... for example corresponding to paths in a taxonomy
>
> Linda: no answer right now, will have to think about it
>
> Were you talking about recommending some system for creating HTTP URI
> identifiers, i.e. some sort of URI strategy or pattern? Specifically where
> the features can be organised into some system like a hierarchy, as with
> administrative regions? There are some examples from Geonovums testbed here
> https://github.com/geo4web-testbed/topic3/wiki/URI-Strategy under
> Hierarchical URIs.
>
> Just trying to understand what you mean… we could add some guidance to the
> BP about this. I think that would be helpful.
>
> Linda
>
> ______________________________________
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> Linda van den Brink
> Adviseur Geo-standaarden
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