Cool URIs for the Semantic Web

During practical RDF projects, one big challenge is always how to choose 
good URIs for your resources. The RDF standards say very little about 
this topic. There are some best practices and helpful recommendations, 
but they are scattered all over the web. Creating "cool URIs for the 
semantic web" is hard.

Richard Cyganiak, Max Völkel and Leo Sauermann have written an article 
about how to choose cool URIs, filled with practical knowledge and 
background information about the problem and solutions. We have 
collected what we have learned during projects such as Semantic 
MediaWiki, dbpedia, D2R Server, Gnowsis, and Nepomuk. We hope that this 
article is a help for you or your students to get started programming 
Semantic Web applications.

Read it

    * http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/11/cooluris/
      <http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/%7Esauermann/2006/11/cooluris/> (html)
    * http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/dfkidok/publications/TM/07/01/tm-07-01.pdf
      (PDF version)

Abstract
The Resource Description Framework RDF allows you to describe web 
documents and resources from the real world---people, organisations, 
things---in a computer-processable way. Publishing such descriptions on 
the web creates the semantic web. URIs are very important as the link 
between RDF and the web. This article presents guidelines for their 
effective use. We discuss two strategies, called 303 URIs and hash URIs. 
We give pointers to several web sites that use these solutions, and 
briefly discuss why several other proposals have problems.

Notice: we have written the article late last year, but published it 
this year. You can republish or copy this article under the Creative 
Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 License 
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/>.

-- 
____________________________________________________
DI Leo Sauermann       http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann 

Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer 
Kuenstliche Intelligenz DFKI GmbH
Trippstadter Strasse 122
P.O. Box 2080           Fon:   +49 631 20575-116
D-67663 Kaiserslautern  Fax:   +49 631 20575-102
Germany                 Mail:  leo.sauermann@dfki.de

Geschaeftsfuehrung:
Prof.Dr.Dr.h.c.mult. Wolfgang Wahlster (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Walter Olthoff
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats:
Prof. Dr. h.c. Hans A. Aukes
Amtsgericht Kaiserslautern, HRB 2313
____________________________________________________