Re: the HCLS and URI schemes

Hi Michel,

The work HCLS is doing is open to anyone in the HCLS community. The  
best way to influence the process, for the better, is to take some  
time and participate in it. We've had several phone calls, publicly  
announced. We will have more. Have you joined any of them? There's  
also a number of wiki pages, and the invitation to add more material  
so that there is more to work with.

Regarding the goals of the report. It is a recommendation on URI  
usage. I don't know exactly what it will contain (since that's  
something that's being worked on) but I won't rule out  
recommendations on URI schemes. Whether or not that happens would  
depend on the participants thinking it would be a good idea or not. I  
am, personally, not very interested in only giving a neutral history  
URI schemes, or only saying what the problem is, even though I expect  
that this sort of analysis will be part of the report. The larger  
HCLS community is interested in making some progress on this, and  
there are frequent calls for specific recommendations, and there a  
set of requirements driven by a mixture of existing applications,  
past experience with what has worked and not worked, and general  
principles of web architecture.

We are ignoring no discussions, but can't be held responsible if we  
advertise an open process and interested parties don't show up.

Regards,
Alan

http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG_BioRDF_Subgroup/Tasks/URI_Best_Practices

On Aug 6, 2007, at 12:48 PM, Michel_Dumontier wrote:

>
> Alan,
>
> The HCLS should outline existing mechanisms by which one can uniquely
> identify a resource, independent of its resolution. Bioinformatics has
> been forever plagued by innumerate resource identifiers, for which,
> finally, semantic web technologies (XML/RDF/OWL) provide the semantics
> to support data integration, in the presence of unique identifiers  
> and,
> optionally, schemas/ontologies. A clear description of this problem  
> and
> the requirements for its solutions would be useful outcomes of HCLS
> activity.
>
> While there are arguments FOR and AGAINST a great number of URI  
> schemes,
> there is ABSOLUTELY no requirement for a particular resolution  
> protocol
> to be recommended by HCLS. Indeed, by advocating a certain technology,
> HCLS "recommendations" will surely alienate a large number of people
> that it aims to represent, and ultimately its report will fall by the
> wayside. Ignore these discussions at your peril. The fact that the  
> HCLS
> community uses HTTP URIs or LSID URNs or INFO URIs, etc,  
> illustrates the
> breadth of community requirements. An analysis into these motivations
> and summarizing existing mechanisms would surely be a useful
> contribution for current and future adopters.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -=Michel=-
>
>

Received on Monday, 6 August 2007 22:08:44 UTC