Re: URIs and Unique IDs

----- "Alan Ruttenberg" <alanruttenberg@gmail.com> wrote:

> This is a good example of why using names in URIs is a bad idea. If
> the URIs were opaque numeric ids you could have simply changed the
> label on the old "broader" to "broader transitive" and moved on. As
> SKOS didn't do this it created problems for itself.

This will only hide the issue from applications and make it impossible to determine the users original intent if they published their document before the change occurred. For upper ontologies being community developed I think it is wise not to hide these changes behind opaque URI's which never change on principle.

> The OBO ontologies are moving towards *all* URI being numeric id based
> for this reason (until recently it had only been classes that were
> named that way).

How will people using OBO ever be sure that they aren't going to use a term thinking it doesn't have reaching consequences like the broader->broaderTransitive difference and find out in future that it has changed and influenced their results in some way when someone could reasonably have determined that the nature of the term had changed and it needed a new number/name/URI/UID. I do recognise that whenever any property attached to a term changes that technically there could be a difference in the results of some application utilising the data, but reverting to saying that things just migrate on the spot always isn't a suitable solution either IMO.

Cheers,

Peter

Received on Monday, 10 November 2008 02:19:25 UTC