[VM] citing purls in cookbook? [Re: [VM] HTTP Cookbook review - a response]

At 05:54 PM 1/10/2006 +0100, Thomas Baker wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 06:19:29PM -0500, David Booth wrote:
>> G2.  Regarding the sentence:
>> [[
>> Note also that PURL servers use a 302 redirect code, and therefore
>> ontologies with slash namespaces using PURL servers will not strictly
>> conform with the TAG resolution on httpRange-14 [@@TODOREF].
>> ]]
>> I think it would be best to avoid giving advice that violates the TAG's
>> httpRange-14 decision[5], and as I note below, I think some of the
>> recipes currently violate the TAG's decision.
...
>The TF feels it is important to address this issue somewhere
>in the Cookbook, especially as purl.orgs are used by important
>vocabularies such as Dublin Core and RSS.

That is the position I took during our telecon this week but I am
now having second thoughts.

The reasons to talk about purl.org are
1. Dublin Core and RSS 1.0 use this service
2. To emphasize the importance in investing in namespace names
    that can have a long lifetime

Reason 2 is the stronger motivation for me.  I would like to instill in
people that when they first publish an RDF schema or an OWL
ontology they don't have to get the design right the first time but
it's really important that they choose URLs that can last.  If you
get someone interested in your work, and writing tools that use
it, making those URIs go 404 sometime later is quite unfriendly.

Reason 1 is important but the audience for this cookbook is
supposed to be learning how to do things correctly and is not
necessarily going to be using either DC or RSS.  In particular,
I do not believe we ought to be promoting further use of the
purl.org service for naming RDF resources that are not
information resources until it has a mechanism to support
the 303 See Other redirect for non-information resources.

I now think we should be emphasizing the importance of
persistence of URIs but without citing purl.org and that we
should (continue to) work with the Dublin Core and RSS
owners to find solutions to their needs without including
that in our apache configuration cookbook.

Received on Friday, 13 January 2006 21:26:03 UTC