Re: Problem with Hash based Linked Data URIs

On 2/16/13 10:04 AM, Mo McRoberts wrote:
> As should be blindingly obvious to anybody who's worked with them, hash-based URIs are principally useful where a document describes a _single_ entity within its sphere of reference (though the nature of triples and many ontologies is that there may well be parts of descriptions of other things).
>
> Ontologies/vocabs are a one solid case where it's really not a good idea to use them because it's hard to split them up into separately-served resources later.
>
> (Ironically, as a redirecting service, if the PURL for GR had been http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1/ instead of http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#, it could have redirected to either a hash-based or a hash-less URI — there's no benefit to hash-based URIs if you're always inserting a redirect _anyway_).
>
> On the other hand in the case of "this is the document which describes me" or "this is the document which describes this book", it makes a lot of sense to use hash-based URIs because that document has a notion of a primary topic while anything else described is a supporting adjunct. Even if it's aggregated into a dataset, the subject used in that dataset would be a URI which resolves to that one-thing document URI.

Correct! But as you can see, that's an implementation detail that 
doesn't warrant a totally unnecessary notice in a document that purports 
to formally define what a WebID actually is. A software engineer 
building a WebID based solution will weigh the pros and cons as part of 
an implementation effort etc..

I have one goal: getting Henry and Andrei to remove the unnecessary 
notice about hashless URIs from the current WebID spec. That's it.

Kingsley
>
> M.
>
> On Sat 2013-Feb-16, at 14:33, Adrian Gschwend <ktk@netlabs.org>
>   wrote:
>
>> On 16.02.13 12:10, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Kingsley, just trying to understand the problem better.  When I
>>> click, http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#BusinessEntity it takes me to
>>> the section of the GR vocab that is related to BusinessEntity (via html
>>> anchors).  What should it be doing?
>> That's only because you requested it from a web browser, if you get that
>> as RDF (via rapper for example) it will make a request to
>> http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1 and instead of giving you the answer to
>> what you really want to know  (#BusinessEntity) it downloads the whole
>> ontology which according to rapper is 1834 triples. Everything after the
>> # is handled client side and does not even get through the webserver.
>>
>> This is not handy at all when you start to write code, you get way more
>> than you wanted to know and it gets harder to implement local caching
>> for example. Did that done that, really no fun to implement properly
>> with hash based URIs.
>>
>> So I'm really no fan of hash based URIs either, especially on bigger
>> ontologies/datasets.
>>
>> cu
>>
>> Adrian
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Adrian Gschwend
>> @ netlabs.org
>>
>> ktk [a t] netlabs.org
>> -------
>> Open Source Project
>> http://www.netlabs.org
>>
> --
> Mo McRoberts - Technical Lead - The Space
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-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
Founder & CEO
OpenLink Software
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