query about best practices for URI resolution

All,

Background: The Marine Metadata Interoperability project is about to  
deploy a server of ontologies, particularly containing vocabularies  
and mappings from marine science.  (Initially most of the ontologies  
will be fairly simple vocabularies and mappings, but over time an  
increasing number will be more complex.) We intend to provide human- 
centric resolvable URIs representing the resources of both the served  
vocabularies and their terms.  (We appreciate that the URIs should be  
considered 'just strings', not semantically parseable, but that  
semantic information can be used to uniquely build a URI.)

WIth the publication of http://www.w3.org/TR/swbp-vocab-pub/  (thank  
you!!!), we now have just a few relatively narrow questions.

1) Some members of the community we serve will want to use URLs for  
their terms, and some will want to use URNs, depending on  
circumstances; sooner or later, some of the same resources will need  
to be accessed via both forms, so we will want to resolve both.  Is  
the best approach: (a) make one form the URI of the resource, and the  
other one just another link or URI that we resolve back to that  
resource, (b) same as (a) but we create an independent set of  
resources so that we can explicitly relate the alternate resource to  
the original, or (c) allow either form to be used as 'the resource',  
and use owl:sameAs to relate them? Or is there another agreed  
approach?  The last seems best because it make the relationship  
explicit for inferencing, but I figure a lot of purists get upset  
about two URIs for the same resource.

2) Is there a de facto or best practice for specifying URNs between  
the time that you know what your URNs should look like, and the time  
your application has not yet been approved?  I've seen a lot of  
different practices used or recommended....

3) Is it generally OK to serve RDF (e.g., for a term) as a complete  
OWL XML file -- should semantic web applications that expect RDF be  
able to process that?

I appreciate your considered advice, or references to documents that  
provide a credible answer.

John


--------------
John Graybeal   <mailto:graybeal@mbari.org>  -- 831-775-1956
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
Marine Metadata Interoperability Project: http://marinemetadata.org

Received on Tuesday, 21 October 2008 06:41:32 UTC