- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 12:20:41 -0400
Kristof Zelechovski wrote: > Therefore, link rot is a bigger problem for CURIE > prefixes than for links. There have been a number of people now that have gone to great lengths to outline how awful link rot is for CURIEs and the semantic web in general. This is a flawed conclusion, based on the assumption that there must be a single vocabulary document in existence, for all time, at one location. This has also lead to a false requirement that all vocabularies should be centralized. Here's the fear: If a vocabulary document disappears for any reason, then the meaning of the vocabulary is lost and all triples depending on the lost vocabulary become useless. That fear ignores the fact that we have a highly available document store available to us (the Web). Not only that, but these vocabularies will be cached (at Google, at Yahoo, at The Wayback Machine, etc.). IF a vocabulary document disappears, which is highly unlikely for popular vocabularies - imagine FOAF disappearing overnight, then there are alternative mechanisms to extract meaning from the triples that will be left on the web. Here are just two of the possible solutions to the problem outlined: - The vocabulary is restored at another URL using a cached copy of the vocabulary. The site owner of the original vocabulary either re-uses the vocabulary, or re-directs the vocabulary page to another domain (somebody that will ensure the vocabulary continues to be provided - somebody like the W3C). - RDFa parsers can be given an override list of legacy vocabularies that will be loaded from disk (from a cached copy). If a cached copy of the vocabulary cannot be found, it can be re-created from scratch if necessary. The argument that link rot would cause massive damage to the semantic web is just not true. Even if there is minor damage caused, it is fairly easy to recover from it, as outlined above. -- manu -- Manu Sporny President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: A Collaborative Distribution Model for Music http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2009/04/04/collaborative-music-model/
Received on Friday, 15 May 2009 09:20:41 UTC