Re: About URI in RDF Applications

Hi Simone, 

in general, it seems that the structure of your URIs really depends on
what you want to do with them - what reads better (what makes a better
hierarchy), what makes better links etc. I don't know of formal "good
practices" published by anybody, but then, I haven't looked.

For the links part, if you'll have a lot of links from a person
description to their calendar etc, it makes a difference to have
"calendar" as the relative URI from /simoneonofri/person rather than
"/simoneonofri/calendar" from "/person/simoneonofri".

If, on the other hand, you have a lot of links between things of the
same type (calendar of simone linking to calendar of jacek, or simone
description linking to jacek description), the opposite structure would
be better. 

Also, putting username in the first part of the path kills all
alternatives, unless you want to have reserved/banned usernames, whose
presence in the URI would then mean something else.
(e.g. /simoneofori/person but /@app/login)

None of this touches on the question of whether client will try to
decompose the URIs for meaning, which they shouldn't.

Make sure to think about the future - what new kinds of URIs you might
want to have later? How would they fit in the structure? What if your
app adds extensions/plugins, a la Facebook applications? How could they
fit?

When you make a decision on some URI structure, try to stick to it as
long as you can through the evolution of your application, and learn
from the difficulties. Then please write an article about it. 8-)

Hope it helps,
Jacek


On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 09:33 +0100, Simone Onofri wrote:
> Dear Semantic Folks,.
> 
> I'm building a demo of an RDF-based - file system storage on the first
> time - application based on Tim's SemWebAppMetro [1]. So I would like
> to propose an update of the map linking place data to on Photos.
> 
> Secondly I'm thinking about the queston of URI. I know this can be
> influenced by some factors and application itself but what is the best
> practice - in general and in this case in particular? Or there are
> some pointers about this?
> 
> By the way URI can be type oriented
> 
> /person/simoneonofri
> /calendar/simoneonofri
> 
> or user oriented
> 
> /simoneonofri/person
> /simoneonofri/calendar
> 
> Cheers,
> Simone
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/0623-sb-IEEEStorConf/SemWebAppMetro.png
>

Received on Thursday, 6 November 2008 05:26:25 UTC