Re: [VM] HTTP Cookbook, revised editor's draft

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 10:58:06AM -0500, David Wood wrote:
> If you want to continue to use a single file name as an example,  
> that's fine.  The version example can go into a following paragraph:
> 
>   "Create a file which contains a complete RDF/XML serialization of  
> your ontology, as of a certain date.  Give the file a name that  
> represents the modification date, such as '2005-10-31.rdf'.  All  
> resources defined by the ontology are described in this file.  This  
> file represents a 'snapshot' or 'version' of the ontology.
> 
>   Alternately, the file name may represent a version number, such as  
> '1.01.rdf'."

Dave,

I agree that we can and should recommend that people use time
stamps (or version numbers) in file and directory names but
suggest we take the explanation one step further.

I suggest we say somewhere that these time stamps are being
used as a social convention -- not in the expectation that
one should be able to extract or infer meaningful date (or
version) information from a pathname or URI string.

This has come up in recent VM telecons [1]:

    > -- Provenance and URIs.  Provenance is supported by using
    >    the final URI from the chain of redirects as the name of
    >    the graph; different URIs represent different versions of a
    >    vocabulary.  Tom has noted that, in practice, "date-stamped"
    >    URIs are often used and suggests we explicitly acknowledge
    >    both that URI strings are in theory opaque and unparsable
    >    and that there are de-facto social conventions for using
    >    date stamps or version numbers [15].
    ...
    > [15] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2005Nov/0078.html

Tom

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swbp-wg/2005Nov/0122.html

-- 
Dr. Thomas Baker                      baker@sub.uni-goettingen.de
SUB - Goettingen State                            +49-551-39-3883
and University Library                           +49-30-8109-9027
Papendiek 14, 37073 Göttingen

Received on Monday, 28 November 2005 16:43:59 UTC